


The Death of You

by ViridianPanther



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Needs a Hug, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Whump, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani centric, M/M, Mission Fic, Non-Linear Narrative, Nuclear Weapons, POV Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, POV Second Person, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Whump, for London 2020 which is depressing AF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:27:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25650604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViridianPanther/pseuds/ViridianPanther
Summary: or: The Old Guard attempt to survive 2020, from Joe’s perspective.Today, as you cycle through London, you and Nicky try to process what was done to you, and whether you were justified in Booker's punishment. An unpleasant encounter on the road adds to the misery on one of the worst days of your life.Eight and a half centuries ago, you happened upon the mysterious Frank, the man like you, on the banks of the Ebro outside Tortosa. You inserted yourself back into his life as he tested the limits of his own immortality, because he shouldn't have to be alone.On Hallowe’en 2020, with the world spinning faster than ever, you and Nicky will be pushed to your limits on a missing ship in the the Bering Sea. The end of the world is perilously close. A sacrifice will have to be made. Just how immortal is an immortal?
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 46
Kudos: 111





	1. Ride or Die

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warnings:** the violence/gore warning applies throughout, including decapitations, explosions, etc. There's one scene with a verbal homophobic attack in present-day London (this comes from my personal experience and I felt it was important to include.) We'll also see mentions of current affairs (geopolitics, racism, fascism, coronavirus, protests, war, nuclear weapons etc.)
> 
> As you'd expect, we'll be exploring Yusuf and Nicolò's respective faiths at various points in their lives. I've done my best researching Sunni Islam and Catholicism, but if I've got anything wrong, or even offensive, please message me on Tumblr (viridianpanther) and I'll fix it. I'm also pretty sure I've got the order of events wrong so it may not match up _exactly_ to the movie canon, but I literally don't care any more because writing this was So. Much. Fun.

### Now: London

“I don’t want to see you for a week,” Andy says, to you and to Nicky.

“Boss, we’re fine,” Nicky begins—

“You were abducted,” replies Andromache the Scythian, her face sharpening. “You need some time to recover. I _insist._ Meet us in a week. Netherlands. Quebec safe house.”

A week seems like overkill, and it feels very wrong to be leaving Andy. You _have_ just had a year off. And yet, as you well know, mental trauma does _not_ just seal itself up and disappear.

Nicky glances at you. Nods.

“There’s a safe house Q?” Nile is incredulous. “How many safe houses _do_ you have?” Although you can see her doing the math in her head, so no-one bothers to answer. And it’s quickly followed with another question: “where in the Netherlands?”

“Waddinxveen. It’s just outside Gouda,” you reply, jumping in because your Dutch pronunciation is probably the best of the three of them. “Not far.”

Nile’s eyebrows screw up as she forms another question—

“Gouda,” Nicky repeats, this time using a hard English ‘g’ sound rather than a Dutch fricative. “Or…” and here he mangles the place’s original pronunciation (rhymes with ‘louder’) and tries to pronounce it like a native English speaker would: “good-ah?”

 _“Oh, right.”_ A flash of recognition on Nile’s face. “Like the cheese.”

“Yes,” nods Nicky. “Like the cheese.”

“Sorry,” Nile says. “Brainfart. Guess I’ve got a lot to learn.”

“It’s alright,” you smile. “You’re new. None of us knows everything.”

Nicky flashes a smile at you. He’s thinking the same thing. _She knows about cheese. She’s a keeper._

You return the smile, but you feel it frosts over sooner than it should.

The Old Guard is on London rental bicycles, pootling away from Wapping. Now you have had some time and some motion to think about it, you are glad to have the week of breathing room. A lot has happened in the last few days.

(You are still processing your feelings towards Booker as the team turns left onto Cable Street. Yes, he betrayed you. Yes, he has his own pain to live with. Yes, you have Nicky, and that means you are lucky. Yes, it could easily have gone the other way—)

The sky is dimming, and you are salmon, swimming against the tidal flow of commuters out from the City. The two-way bike lane is really too narrow, and you are all brushing shoulders with a stream of people—local kids on mountain bikes, lithe middle-aged men in lycra huffing into their dropped handlebars, old women on roadsters with twinkling headlamps—trying to squeeze through in one phase of the traffic lights. It has changed to red by the time the Old Guard reaches it. A few people chance it, and Andy moves ahead, crossing the stop line, looking both ways.

 _“Andromache,”_ you call, low but loud enough for her to hear, using her name because that’ll get her attention. “No risks.”

She replies to your death glare with her own, but stops, because she knows you’re right. It’s not the safety thing (although Nile’s naïveté when she asked if there were helmets made all of you laugh, Nile included.) None of you can risk Andy jumping a red light and drawing the attention of the police.

You nip in front of her after the lights change, and Nicky comes alongside you, matching your pace as you head west, two abreast. Nile, a little uneven but gaining confidence in her own control, comes alongside Andy. Protecting her, in a way.

“We were here in 1936,” you say to Nile, to pass the time at the next set of traffic lights when you’re sure no-one else can hear you.

“What happened in 1936?” she asks.

“Battle of Cable Street,” says Andy. “Fascist march.”

You glance over your shoulder, and she cracks a smile.

“We were barely needed,” she continues. “The locals threw chamberpots at them.”

“No _way_ ,” Nile grins, but she knows it’s true.

The group passes the old site of the Royal Mint (soon to be luxury apartments) and the Tower of London, and peels apart at Blackfriars Junction, which you’re sure looks different from the last time you were here. The (new) bike lane has aged in, the (even newer) temporary barriers and kerbs around a construction site have not. The (older) trees are looking healthy.

You and Nicky go straight ahead onto Embankment. Andy and Nile turn right: they will go to Euston, then take a train to Coventry, then drive to Hull, and take a ferry to Rotterdam, which will get them close enough and should shake any followers.

(“I’m driving,” insisted Nile, as they were laying out this plan. Pointedly adding, while glaring at Andy: “carefully. Legally.”)

“She’s good,” says Nicky, as you come off Parliament Square and turn onto Millbank. The clock tower (Big Ben, or St. Stephen’s Tower, or the Elizabeth Tower, depending on who you ask) is encased in scaffolding as it undergoes renovation. Its famous chime is silent.

You nod. Now you have crossed the core of London, the nexus of its cycling network, and you are _with_ the stream of people leaving the City, Westminster, Camden, Lambeth, Southwark. Dispersing westward and returning to their homes. You cannot risk conversation here.

There is a chill in the air, and you feel a spot of rain on your nose. You reach behind you, and bring your hood over your head.

“Joe?”

You glance to your right. Nicky’s smile still makes sparks in your chest.

“We’ll talk on the train,” you tell him, as he comes alongside you again, the two of you taking up the entirety of the blue strip of paint that lines the edges of Chelsea Embankment.

Nothing ever gets past Nicky, and he can tell you’re still cranky and hurting. He weaves a few inches closer to you, and his left hand reaches out—just for a second. Enough to tap your knuckles on the gear shifter.

His touch is the closest thing to home you have—

You jolt as there is a loud **HONK** from your right, and the driver of a white van leans out of his window.

 _“Fucking girly little poofters!”_ he leers, wheezing. The man is probably younger than he looks, with ruddy skin and something wispy that he probably calls a beard.

Now it is your turn to tap Nicolò’s wrist as he contracts with anger, and bellows _“BASTARD!”_ at him in medieval Genoese.

“He’s a little ray of sunshine,” says a woman, tall, Black, dressed professionally, with locs peeking out from under her gold-coloured helmet. She passes you on an electric Dutch omafiets, just on the outside—and she is already reaching for her phone while still moving, holding it up to photograph the van’s registration plate, and noting the name, telephone number, and social media handles of his employer. **GORHAM & Co. FIRE ALARM FITTINGS. Safety is our priority!**

Gold Helmet takes her photos, and then drops back alongside the two of you, and asks: “are you guys OK? I’m so sorry about that.”

“We’re fine,” you reply, although you know you are not, and nor is Nicky, face red with anger, his smile snuffed out.

“I’ll ring his employer,” Gold Helmet says. “Shame them on Twitter.” And then, on seeing your eyebrows harden, she adds: “Don’t worry. I won’t put any pictures of you online.”

You notice the eight-stripe pride flag sticker on her bike’s frame, and a badge on her rucksack with pink, blue, and white lettering. **TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. #LWithTheT #NotADebate**.

Gold Helmet gets it.

“Thank you,” you tell her. “I appreciate you, sister.”

“No worries, babes,” says Golden Helmet, and zips ahead, phone snapping frame after frame of the white van’s decals.

You turn left using the slip lane onto Vauxhall Bridge and another, better-protected bike lane—but not before giving the van driver a furious middle finger as you pass him, stopped at the traffic lights. He honks his horn again, and screams something like “get out and fight me.”

Vauxhall Bridge, southbound, points south-east. Old habit tells you this is roughly the direction of Makkah. You plead with the Almighty under your breath. To show mercy on the van driver and help him see the error of his ways. To bless Golden Helmet for her righteous anger, and her kindness.

If the Almighty is listening.

You continue to Vauxhall, and dock your bikes under the railway arch. You breathe hard as you stand away from the bike lane, and stare at the mural on the wall. Flowing fragments of a six-striped rainbow flag.

You accept this as a sign of safety, and so does Nicolò, as he places a hand at the small of your back.

“I’m here, Yusuf,” he whispers, in Derja. “I’ve got you, my sweetheart.”

And you know this isn’t fair, because Nicky is as angry as you are and he’s the one doing the emotional labour. And you know that none of it is fair, and you’ve been around long enough. It is not even the worst homophobic abuse you’ve had in the last year, let alone the last millennium.

It won’t be the death of you. But that doesn’t stop it from hurting. The story of your life.

You turn, and fold yourself into Nicolò’s arms, grateful for the comfort. Grateful for him.

Nicky randomises the virtual card details on the phone Copley gave you, then buys tickets to Clapham Junction, then to Guildford, and then to Portsmouth. It is just reaching the end of the evening peak as you follow him into the train for Strawberry Hill, and the two of you linger by the doors in a place you know the CCTV cameras won’t catch your faces.

Your eyes scan the back of a discarded _Evening Standard_ in the vestibule. **BLACK MONDAY,** screams the West End Final on Monday, March 9th. **FOURTH BIGGEST CITY FALL AS VIRUS PANIC HITS MARKETS.** In a box in the corner: an eight-page special on the horse races at Cheltenham. Presumably there were large crowds there.

(It is just over a century since you fell ill with the Spanish flu. So did Nicky, whilst nursing you in Aix-les-Bains. He got lucky, and recovered from it twice. You died the first time, and then got infected again, three times. None of this is anything you wish to repeat, but if your experience with flu and the Black Death are any guide, you may not have a choice. In any case, a flying visit to Malta seems off the cards for now.)

You feel better after changing trains at Clapham Junction, onto an all-stations metro train to Guildford. You take a bay seat, and Nicky sits opposite, allowing his shin to rest against yours.

“Surprise,” he says, and you blink and notice the smell of salt and bread. Nicky has rested a warm paper bag on your knee, a stylised logo on the surface. A plain, salted pretzel. You guess he must have got it at the station, while you were scanning the departures board on the footbridge. “You need to eat something, my love,” Nicky pleads.

That’s enough to melt your face back into a smile for the moment, as you grasp his hand and squeeze it—just for a second.

But you can tell there is a frost in Nicolò’s eyes too, and he vocalises it as you stand on Platform 4 at Guildford, shivering in the windchill, being buffeted with occasional swells of drizzle.

“You think you were too cruel to him, don’t you?” he says.

You know you were. You know you will hold that grudge longer than you should.

Nicky glances either way, checking for anyone who looks like they might give you trouble, before slipping his hand into yours. The physical contact slows the churn of thoughts in your head, a momentary lull—

“He’s young,” you say.

“So were we, once,” he replies.

You are only now realising that you agreed with Andy to exile Booker for what will be a third of his life, on completion. In any case, one hundred years is a long time.

“It was selfish,” Nicolò says, in his particular flavour of Italian—a little archaic, with some Ligurian consonant sounds, and that makes every word land even harder. “Inflicting pain to heal his own. Making everyone else’s grief all about him. ‘Look at me,’” he added here, putting on a mock French accent and speaking in pidgin French and English, “‘je m’appelle Sébastien, and I’m the saddest man in the world so I’m going to put my friends in danger…’”

(He is having second thoughts, too. Nicky had proposed a decade-long exile. At that time, you were happy to not see Booker’s face again for half a millennium. Andy had negotiated you both to a hundred years. Nile had quoted the Sermon on the Mount at you all. _If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also._ You could not put the sight of Nicky’s brains being blown out from your mind.)

“Who are we to judge how he deals with his pain?” you wonder. Doubting your own judgment, and wondering if Nile might have had a point.

You still love Booker, your brother, your friend, even though he was an ass, and he needs to face the consequences of what he has done, and you almost could not bear to look at him earlier.

And then Nicolò’s eyes narrow, and you can hear the tension uncoiling. (He is always more passionate in his home languages.)

“They could’ve killed us,” he seethes. And then he’s blinking away tears, as his eyes lock with yours. “They could’ve killed you, Yusuf, my darling.”

Seeing him like this makes your heart ache.

You bring him close to you, and whisper “darling” in ancient Genoese atop your own churn of building tears. Weeping together does not make the pain disappear, but it gives you something else to do.

It is one of the worst days of your life so far.

  


* * *

  


### Then: Tortosa

It was around fifty years between the day you first died by the hands of the man you then only knew as “The Frank”, and the day you first died _for_ The Frank.

(This is a story you will tell Nile one day soon, and it will simultaneously disgust her, make her roar with laughter, and make her thankful that she is not the one to find it out herself. “The Frank” will hold your hand tight as you tell it, and jump in with additional details, and the occasional peck on the lips.)

At your first sight of him in decades, it took you a while to realise it was _him_. All you saw to begin with was a figure, white-skinned, flat-chested, bathing in the Ebro at first light. Your breath halted, and you wondered why Iblīs had decided to tempt _you_ on this specific day.

Then he turned, and you recognised that proud nose, and those eyebrows.

Your blood ran cold. Your fingers reached for your saif before you knew what they were doing.

The Frank had guessed someone was there, judging by the way his body tensed, and he gave furtive glances towards you (critically, not _at_ you.)

You were no more than twenty feet away, and had a height advantage of at least ten feet. You could have taken him down.

You had no intention of doing so.

You had come here to forage for berries, and to escape the smell and the hot air and the _noise_ of the besieged citadel. The forty-day truce with the invaders had been agreed twenty-seven days ago. There was only one way this would end. You had been there at Antioch, just a simple merchant, and then you had been there at Jerusalem, and you had no desire to see anything like that again.

The first time you awoke in the ruins of Antioch, you were convinced he was a djinn who had cursed you. By the ninth time, you were no longer sure of anything. You, exhausted, unable to defeat this… _thing_ … had cast aside your weapons, and walked away—as he had done the same. (His eyes had looked straight through you, an expression you will come to know in future centuries as “shell shock”.)

And now, as you looked on the Frank, it was impossible to feel any kind of hate towards him. Shed of his bulky mail, his face and his hair and his torso and his legs exposed to the chilly morning air, he appeared fragile. Soft, even. Like you, he had not aged a day.

You wished you had learned more than a few words of Ligurian and Latin, and had more than a patchy knowledge of the lingua franca’s grammar. You wished, almost more than anything, to join him in the Ebro, to tell him of the decades when you could not put him out of your mind. You wished you knew his name.

And yet—

Once again wondering if this was a temptation, or a test, you buried the affinity in your chest with the impossible Frank, and walked back along the river to the city.

  


* * *

  


It was at last light that evening when you saw him again, missing his left arm.

There was already an ugly red blotch of dried blood in the centre of his chest, presumably from a previous experiment. He was stripped to his waist this time, his sabatons stood some ten feet up the river bank, on top of a woollen undershirt, and that on top of his chain mail, and _that_ on top of a thick cloak.

The Frank’s mouth was twisted in pain. The wound at his shoulder was brand new.

You felt a twist in your stomach. At the sight of his stump arm, even now getting longer, with fingers sprouting from its tips, a bend forming and bones creaking where his new elbow would be, yes. But worse than that—

The Frank was screaming in pain. Breathing fast. Hyperventilating. Shaking.

The only person you had ever met who was like you was hurting, and you felt his pain within you.

He dropped to his knees, convulsing, and you wondered if he was going to vomit, and felt as if you could vomit yourself, as he reached forward—and braced himself on the grass, with his new left hand.

On the river bank, the Frank, the man like you, breathed, almost a sigh of relief. You did the same.

(He was safe. And if you were to lose your arm, it would grow back, albeit slowly and painfully. And he was safe, and that was what mattered—)

But now, the Frank stood, and tentatively picked up his sword again, his hands (including the new one) still shaking. The knot tightened in your stomach again, because you knew he was going to try something, and judging by the look on his face—bracing himself—it would be painful.

 _He should not be doing this,_ you thought. _He should not be doing this alone._

He waved the blade a few times, whipping it around, spinning the hilt in his new hand. You were impressed by his finesse, even as you realised, in horror, as he marked the path the blade would take, around and then at a sharp angle to make contact with his neck—

You knew what he was going to do, knew it was unlikely to work as the contact point was too far up the edge, and in an instant, you resolved to stop it.

A word rose from your insides, one of the three or so you had learned in the Frankish tongues, and the only one you could think of, common to Ligurian and Latin and Sabir:

_“NO!”_

He jumped, and you ran—no, _threw_ yourself down the slope, charging through the vegetation as if it was not there, scratching your face and your arms and feeling a twist and a sharp pain in your ankle as you fell into a hidden gully, but keeping on, because he—

The Frank adjusted his grip on the hilt. He was now looking at you. Legs apart, ready to strike. And his eyes widened as he recognised—

Those ice-blue eyes—

He roared a word, a single syllable, and even though this was not one of the three words of his tongue you had heard before, you knew what this one meant.

_“YOU.”_

You stopped, some five feet away. You had drawn your saif, on instinct, but—

For a moment, there was silence, save for the rustle of the grass under your feet, and your heavy breathing, and his.

And then you threw your saif to the right, let it land on the grass with a _thud_. Hoping that would explain your intention.

The Frank pointed at you, then further back on the grass. An instruction. _Stand back._

“No,” you repeated, not remembering which tongue it was coming out in—

He began moving back on his own feet anyway. Not willing to let you interrupt his experiment.

And then he tensed his arms, flicked the sword upwards, and around—

You took off from your stance, planning to wrest the hilt from his hands—

but you forgot about your twisted ankle, which landed in just the wrong place. No time to get there.

But you could maybe stop him, if—

_Do not kill yourselves. Surely God is most Merciful to you._

You did not know if either of you would survive beheading.

God forbade suicide. But surely He would understand if you inserted yourself into the place of another who was to take his own life?

And so that’s what you did. In the blink of an eye, you inserted yourself into the path of the Frank’s blade,

and the air _whipped_ around you,

and you became aware of a cutting sensation at your neck—

and the Frank screaming in horror—

and you doing the same, until there was no breath left to scream—

  


* * *

  


The world went dark.

  


* * *

  


Your next breath was cold, explosive, and made everything you could feel in the world _shake._

You coughed. The breath burned. Your eyes stung. The world roared and hissed at you.

You wondered if this was the voice of God. If this was what the Prophet (pbuh) saw and heard on Jabal an-Nour. If this was Paradise. Or if it was Hell.

In terror, you screamed, and found you had lungs.

And then there was a flash of darkness, darker still than the sky above, and a gentle _whoosh_ in the air that made you grimace—

Something heavy and warm landed on top of you.

Something in your chest swelled, and your forearms and fingers protested at the scratchy fabric.

You _had_ forearms and fingers.

There was that hissing sound—

You blinked again, and again, and saw flashes of orange, the flickering of flames—not the flames of hell fire, but a campfire.

The hissing sound stopped, and you realised it was soft—and coming from a person.

And in your field of view, lit from behind by the moon, and lit from below by the fire, was a face you recognised.

The Frank allowed himself a breath. It was not as discontinuous as yours, but it was close. (Were those dried teardrops on his cheeks? His eyes were pink, tired…)

You looked down, chanced moving your hands, and found once the initial (excruciating) motion was out of the way, they were just fine. You lifted the fabric up, and peered beneath. All of you was there. Naked. Hairless, unmarked. Pristine.

And then you looked back at the Frank, and he gave you something that almost looked like a smile. You liked the way his nose cast a shadow across his face in the moonlight. And as his smile grew, you found yourself forming one too.

He said something in Ligurian. You couldn’t understand a word of it, but you felt his meaning in your bones. Effusive. Relieved.

He offered you ale from a sheepskin canteen, which made you want to howl in pain as it passed down your gullet, and it felt good. You drank more, and more, drops spilling over your face and into your hair, until there was none left. The Frank snorted. Not angry—it was as if he found it funny.

Now seemed like a good opportunity to use the third word of Ligurian you had learned.

“Thank you,” you said, stumbling over the consonant in the middle.

His face lit up like the sun breaking through storm clouds. And he then astonished you by replying, in your own tongue,

“thank you.”

You blinked. Wondering if this was a dream. The thought crossed your mind again that this man was temptation from God’s path, personified.

“You speak Arabic?”

“Small,” he replied, making a tiny gap between his thumb and forefinger to echo the meaning in case he didn’t get it right.

You were astonished. But then again, you _had_ picked up a few words of Ligurian, because of him. He already spoke more classical Arabic than you did Ligurian.

“Yusuf,” you whispered. And took a breath before repeating, louder, “I am Yusuf.”

He tried to make the sound himself. “Eu- _supp_ -eh,” the Frank attempted, stressing the wrong part. He tried again: “Yu- _seff_ -uh.” You decided you’d allow that for now, affirming it with a smile. You liked the way your own name sounded in his accent. And then he said a strangely-intonated and yet recognisable word, tapping his own chest.

“Nicola,” you repeated, in the closest Arabic approximation you could think of, and Nicola the Frank’s smile widened further still.

Your (new) heart thumped in your (new) chest.

He was on his knees, dressed now in his mail armour, and you barely noticed when, after a furtive glance around him, he touched your cheek.

He said another word in Ligurian that you could not understand, before breathing out, and switching back to his threadbare Arabic.

“Farewell, Yusuf,” he told you.

You spent what felt like eternity after he’d gone, ensconced in Nicola the Frank’s cloak, taking in the constellations above.

It was only after he had departed that you would find a small patch of grass, still sizzling, where your body had landed. You also found your clothes (freshly rinsed in the river and drying next to the embers of the fire), your saif laid neatly next to them, and a bag with a small lump of something that might be bread.

You still had Nicola’s cloak. Before secreting it within your clothes, you completed your wuḍūʾ in the Ebro, read the position of the stars, and laid the cloak south-east before clasping your hands together.

It was between you and God that your prayers for His mercy, and His compassion, and His blessings, were aimed at one specific person.

(At the end, under your breath, you added a direct plea to Him: _I beseech you, God who is most great, allow me to see him again. One more time._ )

You then walked back to Tortosa, Nicola’s cloak buried under your tunic, still stunned by the single kiss he had planted on your forehead.

You wondered if it was what it was like to be struck by lightning.

  


* * *

  


### To Come: The Bering Sea

There will come another day, soon.

It will be the last Saturday, and the last day, of October. All Hallow’s Eve, as Nicky has called it all his life. The contraction to Hallowe’en, along with the pumpkins, are a recent invention.

There will be two days until the next presidential election in the United States, with pictures of long queues at polling stations, postal votes being thrown out, and the incumbent sending regular, livid Tweets to cast doubt on the result before it even exists. Hospitals will, once again, be running out of morgue space to store COVID-19 casualties. Britain will be scrambling to prepare for the end of the Brexit transition period, an unholy mess of their own making.

The Old Guard will have had a busy year already. You will have spent March and April under lockdown in the Quebec safe house, a comfortable but small apartment near a roundabout in Waddinxveen, that smells too strongly of weed from next door to be pleasant. May will be taken up with trying to circumvent the lockdown to reach Hong Kong, to throw yourselves between protesters and the Chinese authorities. June and July will be much the same, but in the USA, where you will buttress walls of anti-fascist and anti-racist protesters against the police. Nicky will tell Nile that it made 1936 on Cable Street look like a street party, and he’ll be right.

By August, you will be zipping between war zones, again using yourselves as human shields. This will carry on into September, and will feel endless.

(In one heart-stopping encounter, Nicky will leap onto a grenade to protect a group of children, and lose his right arm and around sixty percent of his head. You will clutch his intact hand through every one of the agonising one hundred and seven minutes it takes him to regenerate. That night, Nicky will be less upset about being blown to pieces than he will be by the sight of you, shaking, holding back sobs. “You’re the light of my life, Yusuf,” he will whisper in your ear, in Derja, on the verge of tears too, “I love you.”)

Mid-October will almost feel like a revenge quest. Vigilante groups on the coastlines of Europe will be stationed with illegal weaponry, attempting to sink incoming refugee dinghies. The Old Guard will go through them one by one. Nicky and Andy will counter-snipe from a distance. You and Nile will charge a group of men with swastika tattoos and rifles off the edge of the White Cliffs of Dover, Nile letting out a triumphant, righteous _“yeet!”_ as she does so.

All the time, you will have a feeling in your head that none of this is enough. You and Nicky are back on the treadmill. The wheel keeps turning, faster and faster with every revolution. Every bullet you take will feel like a red drop in the ocean.

At this rate, you will almost be glad to have something unusual, and superficially straightforward, to do on Hallowe’en.

It will be something you would not have attempted before Copley came on board to co-ordinate. Ragnarsen, a major shipping company, will notice that one of its container ships, _MS Vejle_ , has simply disappeared in the Bering Sea. Two months later, its transponder will come back on, around fifty kilometres off Iŋaliq (the island known in English as Little Diomede), but the crew will be nowhere to be seen. They will send a team to investigate, who will hastily retreat after being fired on by automatic sentry guns.

At its disappearance, the ship will have been hired—the _whole_ ship, crew included—by a Bay Area tech company called damocles.ai, a name that Nicky will not believe is real, and drawing exasperated stares from Nile and Copley.

“Programmers have a terrible sense of humour,” Copley will tell you in the briefing.

“That guy named his meal replacement ‘soylent,’” Nile will add. “Like the movie. Soylent Green. Where it turns out they’re eating ground up humans.”

damocles.ai’s website will be typical for Bay Area tech companies. Full-page video, parallax scrolling, an ‘about the team’ page consisting of a wall of men, one white woman (head of HR) and two dogs. Andy will roll her eyes as she reads that they are experts in ‘strategic, data-driven, AI defence solutions using cloud-native technologies secured in the blockchain.’ Nile will smell bullshit. It boasts of contracts with ICE, with various American police departments, with the US State Department.

damocles.ai will not tell Ragnarsen what, exactly, was in the two containers they loaded onto _MS Vejle_ at Vladivostok, and will seem remarkably unconcerned about their ‘loss’ of cargo. At their wit’s end, with no-one else willing to investigate the missing ship, Ragnarsen will call on you, The Old Guard. It will be the first work you have done in months that is not pro bono. It won’t be like you _really_ need the money, but an extra safety net can’t be a bad thing. You are now entering what will be the biggest recession of Nile’s life to date, and possibly the biggest anyone outside the Old Guard will ever see.

So this is how you’ll end up, on Hallowe’en 2020, in _MS Jelling_ , a small corvette provided by Ragnarsen, waiting to cross to _MS Vejle_ in a dinghy.

You will already be dressed by this point. Base layers, cargo pants, maximum freedom of movement. Nicky will go for the black hoodie and shades, while you will put a baseball cap on backwards, because it started out as a joke years ago and it’s become your little tradition. On top, a bulletproof vest, because while you dying is not permanent, you’d rather not die in the first place.

(Andy’s pained looks with every scratch and blow she has taken over the last seven months will be weighing heavy on your mind. Although you and Nicky are youthful compared to Andromache the Scythian, the thought of Nicky dying for the last time will still terrify you.)

You will smile at him, and he will smile back, as he always does, because that’s what you two do to each other.

You will need to wait a little for everything to be in place. The raid on _MS Vejle_ will need to be synchronised exactly with Nile and Andy kicking in the doors of damocles.ai’s offices on Turk Street in San Francisco, because you will assume, whatever’s on the ship, it will have a remote control.

“Nile wasn’t wrong about programmer humour,” Nicky will say, in his unique archaic flavour of Ligurian with the word _programmer_ loaned straight from English. He will point out of the window to _MS Vejle_ —her livery modified to gunmetal grey, her name changed to _NS Surprise, Bitch._

“Really?” you will reply, in Tunisian. Nicky will roll his eyes at you as you take a photo and share it with Copley, Nile, and Andy.

 _“Surprise, bitch, indeed,”_ Nile will scoff over the radio.

But your attention will be drawn instead by Copley, who, after a pause, will say: _“that’s odd…”_

It will only takes a few seconds for it to click with you, too—

 _“Hold up,”_ Nile will say, as she realises too. _“NS? N for November? Doesn’t that mean nuclear?”_

“If it’s nuclear,” Nicky will wonder aloud, eyes drifting to the ship’s funnels, “why does it have smokestacks?”

You will find out very soon.

As you ready the dinghy for departure, Nicky will insert a missile into the launcher, and hoist it over his shoulder. His mouth will stretch into that boyish grin, the one he pulled the first time he fired a Bazooka: although these are weapons capable of appalling carnage, it’s an experience that gives Nicky a cheap thrill.

(You will, as you always do, have complex feelings about this. But you’ll smile back, keeping it professional because you’re on the clock, and return his nod.)

Copley will check everything is in place, and ask for a go/no go from the Old Guard.

“Go,” you will say, and Nicky, Nile, and Andy will say the same.

 _“Good luck everyone,”_ Nile will add, ever the optimist. _“Godspeed.”_

 _“On my mark,”_ Copley will reply. _“Three, two, one…”_

The missile will erupt from the tube with an almighty _whoosh_ , and knock out one of the sentry guns on the deck. The other four will immediately begin firing, pummelling _MS Jelling_ with bullets—

One of them will puncture your right lung, and shatter three of your ribs. You will scream as Nicky re-loads, puts himself in front of you, and targets the launcher precisely between two of the other automatic guns, and _fires_ , because this time, although they’re robots, it’ll be personal, because these particular robots hurt _you_.

“Sentry guns down,” he’ll announce over his earpiece once the last turret has been blown to smithereens. He’ll then glance at you, re-gaining your footing, arching your back to check everything’s where it should be again.

You will brush your wrists against each other’s. Just a brief, instantaneous contact—enough to check in and show each other you’re OK.

“We’ll board the ship now,” you will say into the radio.

As you cross in the dinghy, and board the cargo deck of _MS Vejle/NS Surprise, Bitch_ , you will hear chatter from Copley, Nile, and Andy, and you will glance again at Nicky, who will confirm your growing sense of dread.

 _“The project’s called Escalator.app. Automatic weapons platforms,”_ Andy will say, as she examines a concept drawing and a project board in the damocles.ai office. _“A network of autonomous ships in the ocean, a mobile missile grid. Available for hire to anyone who has money, wants death on their enemies.”_

“Air strikes as a service,” Nicky will say, as you both hide in a corner, recovering after taking strikes from another pair of sentry turrets. “I mean, that’s us but with no ethics policy.”

You will give Nicky a rueful smile, and then you will both spring to your feet to disable the sentry turrets on this level.

Something about the word ‘escalator’ will set your teeth on edge.

There will be an armoured shipping container on the deck, with more automatic guns at every entrance. Nicky will take five bullets to the thigh and groin, but he’ll succeed in clearing an entry path for you—and then he’ll throw you his shotgun, even as he winces in pain, staggering, as his muscles knit themselves back together and his genitals reconstitute themselves. (You’ll make a mental note to kiss him better later, as you touch your forehead against his.)

Suddenly, Nile’s voice will chime over the radio, and she will sound _spooked._

 _“Joe, Nicky,”_ she’ll ask, _“describe to me exactly what you’re seeing in that… container thing.”_

Your eyes will widen as Nicky’s headlamp illuminates the innards: a horizontal slot in the container roof, wide enough to allow an exit from…

“I think we found the missiles,” he’ll say, as he peers over a gantry and into the ship’s hold. The pointed heads of four tall rockets will peek just above the floor of the ‘container.’

“These are _big_ ,” you’ll remark. “Twenty metres or so. About Minuteman III size.”

And then, you’ll almost feel as if you’ve been shot in the stomach as you begin to put two and two together. Nicky’s mouth will drop open in horror.

 _“Where have I heard the name Holbrook before?”_ Andy will ask. _“Are they a manufacturer? A subcontractor?”_

 _“Holbrook?!!”_ Nile will reply, and you will practically see her eyes wide with shock.

 _“It’s what the warhead’s labelled as on these diagrams,”_ Andy will say—

and then it will fall into place for her, too, just as Copley finishes Googling.

“That’s the warhead in the Trident missiles,” you will whisper.

And _that_ will be why _Motor Ship Vejle_ was renamed to _Nuclear Ship Surprise, Bitch_.

 **“SHIT,”** the Old Guard will say, almost all at once.

  


* * *

  


If there is one thing the Old Guard emphatically does not want to survive, it is the end of the world.

You have survived being irradiated before, on a difficult mission in Pripyat in 1986. Upon completion, you all marched to the edge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the nude, having discarded your clothes after they kept giving you radiation burns. (This was nowhere near as erotic as it might sound.)

You know you can survive evisceration, decapitation, and all other manners of violent death. But to date, none of you will have ever actually been vaporised. You are immortal, not invincible, and something about this fate seems a step too far.

All of you (bar Nile) lived through the world’s first, and only (so far) nuclear war, the blistering one-two punch of mass murder on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You were there during the ratcheting tensions of the 60s and 70s, and the proliferation of the Bomb to India, to Pakistan, to China, to North Korea.

You found it hard to articulate why the spectre of nuclear armageddon haunted you when you were, functionally, immortal. That was until September 1984, when, in a hotel lounge in Inverness, you watched a TV movie on BBC1 called _Threads_. Neither you or Nicky got any sleep at all that night, and the next job was a bust.

The Old Guard might survive a nuclear holocaust. Hell, it may _even_ be possible for you to regenerate from a cloud of charged atoms resulting from an initial explosion. But what would happen then? No functioning society? No food? God forbid, no other humans?

As much as you loved Nicky, you knew living in a nuclear wasteland would shatter the two of you, like the atoms in a fission warhead.

  


* * *

  


Seventeen minutes later, everything will have gone to shit.

Your first suggestion on ways to disable the rockets will be too naïve, because damocles.ai has already thought of it. If you were to destroy _MS Vejle’s_ long range satellite antenna, it would be a logical assumption that it would prevent a remote launch being ordered.

 _“No,”_ Nile will say, as she pores over diagrams in the passenger seat of the damocles.ai Chief Finance Officer’s Tesla. _“There are multiple entry points, and they fall back to a GPRS receiver in the missile units themselves. They’re all fully fuelled and ready to launch.”_

You’ll look to Nicky. No convenient ‘off’ switch. He will be irked, and worried.

 _“Then the plan changes to asset denial,”_ Andy will say, from the driver’s seat, and you’ll just _know_ from the squealing of the motor and the honking of cars that she’s caning it away from San Francisco in the stolen car, probably in excess of a hundred and forty miles an hour. Although you generally disapprove of Andy’s habit of speeding (her own safety aside, she could easily kill an innocent bystander) this time, you won’t even mind because she’s coming for you, and that’s what you need right now.

 _“Agreed,”_ Nile will say. _“We stop the rockets launching. Scuttle the ship, if necessary.”_

Nicky will nod to you, checking for approval. You’ll take a deep breath, and nod your own affirmation.

“Let’s do it, boss,” you’ll say.

There will be another six automatic turrets at the base of the hold. Nicky will manage to snipe one of them, and you’ll put yourself between him and another one, charge for it, and put the searing pain out of your mind as you blast it once, twice, three, four, _five_ … it will fall to the ground at the same time you do.

Your corner of the room will be clear. This will give you time to take a few breaths, and regurgitate one of the shells that didn’t make an exit wound. ( _Need a new t-shirt,_ you’ll note for later.)

 _“You still with me, Joe?”_ Nile will ask over the conn.

“Yeah,” you’ll grunt.

Nicky will help you up. His fingers will brush against yours as he passes you back your shotgun. His touch will embolden you.

“Get one of the panels open,” he’ll tell you. “See if you can cut the fuel lines, maybe we can drain them. I’ll deal with the turrets.”

“Could be a fire risk,” you’ll reply, although you know the fuel tank will be fireproof… it’s not unheard of for them to be breached. That was how the _Challenger_ disaster happened.

 _“Next flight to Fairbanks is a commercial in 39 minutes,”_ Copley will announce. _“ETA six hours forty. Nile, Andy, you should have tickets on your phones.”_

Six hours and forty minutes is a long time, and you will wonder idly if you’ve already set off a silent alarm. You’ll have an impatient thought about how you’re going to get rid of the warheads.

 _One thing at a time. One foot in front of the other,_ you’ll tell yourself.

There’ll be a _boom_ from across the deck.

“I’m fine, Joe,” Nicky will call, by way of reassurance. “Fuel lines.”

And so, that’s what you’ll do. Unsheathe your saif, and use it to pry open the servicing panel on the side of the nearest rocket.

The hose connecting the engine to the fuel tanks will be, as you expected, reinforced with kevlar. You’ll begin sawing at it, trying to un-do the threads of the weave one by one, getting frustrated because this always takes forever—

And then you realise the hose is very loosely attached at one end. A good _tug_ should—

And it will.

You will be knocked backwards, and your skin will immediately crust over with the instant, burning chill of super-cooled oxygen, expanding, evaporating when exposed to the air, and you will stagger—

and fall—

and realise the deck is ramping away underneath you, and begin to slide backwards, and you will hear Nicky call your name as you look upwards (downwards) and scrabble against the metal surface of the hull with skin that’s peeling away—

_“JOE!”_

Your arm will catch on a railing. You’ll be falling out of an exhaust hatch, cut into the hull to provide an escape for… well, the gases that will have blown you out here. A feature, not a bug.

You will feel your shoulder dislocate as the rest of you tries to complete its inexorable acceleration under gravity.

 _“Nicky! What’s happening?”_ you’ll hear Nile say, just about—

 _“I can’t see shit!”_ Nicky will reply, panicked, and you’ll only hear his voice over the radio, because there will still be the explosive, awful _hiss_ of the oxygen tank emptying itself into the deck—

You’ll try to speak into the radio. It will be in vain. You can barely breathe. You can barely remember your own name until you hear:

“Joe!”

Something long and loose will come towards you. A rope, or a chain, or a cable. You will see a figure at the other end, in black.

Your Nicky. Your angel. The man whose path you crossed because God willed it.

 _Everything’s going to be OK,_ you’ll think.

And, without thinking about it, you will reach for the rope, grasp it, and begin to haul—

except the motion won’t go in the direction you expect, because you won’t move, but it will, and you’ll land back on your elbow, clinging to the railings, arm feeling dead—

and Nicky—

**_“NICOLÒ!”_ **

he will scream something like “cazzo!” as he loses his footing, and tumbles, _whirls_ forward, violently.

His head will _thunk_ against the hull, and your Nicky will bounce off _MS Vejle_ ’s outer surface like a Ken doll being thrown overboard by a child, and plunge into the Bering Sea,

And you will not hear the splash, not over the swell of the sea,

and the hiss of the oxygen tank,

and your screams of pain from the skin on your face re-forming,

and Nile on the radio shouting _“Nicky! Joe! Talk to me!”_

and your own screams because Nicky—

Your Nicky will be gone. Beneath you. Sinking under the choppy waves, and drowning in ice water.

Gone.

_“Joe?”_

That’ll be Andy’s voice, and it will be running colder than solid oxygen.

And you will open your mouth to report what’s happened, but the words will not form up, because that would mean acknowledging it as truth…

But then there will be another spike of pain from your shoulder, and a cracking sound as it re-sets itself into position.

The pain will embolden you. Your focus will narrow, because the most important thing in the world, more than _anything_ , more than the end of the world, is getting Nicolò out of this, alive.

“Nicky’s gone overboard,” you’ll say into the radio. Your voice reduced to a ragged, shut-down drawl.

And then you will add:

“I’m going to get him.”

Nile makes a sound that’s something like “oh my god.” Andromache will remain silent, her stare on the road tightening.

The Old Guard has already lost one person to drowning. It will _not_ lose another.

You will not allow it.

“Wish me luck,” you will say.

And then you will call Nicolò’s name, down to the surface of the Bering Sea. Hoping he has not been drawn into the ship’s propellors, or sunk too far beneath the surface.

 _“Godspeed, Joe,”_ Nile will say.

“I’m coming to get you, my love,” you will breathe, to centre yourself.

And then, you will let go of the railing.


	2. Down With The Ship

### Now: The English Channel

You shake awake as if you have been immersed in ice water, and take a deep, bitty breath.

The nightmare was not exactly vivid, but it terrified you. You blink to check your eyes are still working, and you tighten your arms to check—

Yes. He’s there.

You sink your face into the nape of Nicky’s neck, and he smells like home. He _is_ home. Your grip around him tightens.

He is fast asleep, but it feels like he stirs, and shuffles backwards a little. Pressing himself closer to you.

Your insides burgeon, and you feel as if you could overflow with your love for this incredible, incredible man. His smile, the mole on his cheek, the curve of his hip, even the smell of his sweaty armpits in his day clothes and the greasiness of his unwashed hair… the way he breathes, the pursed line of his lip… it is bliss.

Your hand is still shaking. You are wide awake, and you know you will not sleep any time soon.

The time is only just coming up to midnight, you are both still fully dressed, and the lights are on. Today must have taken more out of you than you realised. Your stomach rumbles.

If you just lie here, you will not sleep, and then you will be at Saint-Malo at 6:30am tomorrow and dead on your feet. And your mind will race all night, and then the nightmares will be worse tomorrow.

Nicky will understand.

You brush your lips against his jawbone, and then his cheek, and allow gravity to pull you into him for a few seconds more. Soaking in him, because being with Nicolò makes eternity a joy.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks, and your heart gulps. Of course. He was awake all this time.

You make a grumble in your throat. Nicky squeezes your hand in his own, and yawns, before tilting his head upwards, and to the left, and opens his eyes.

You hold him tighter, and in the warm glow of the cabin’s room lights, he looks so _pure_ like this, so… _alive._

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asks, switching to Derja as he does when he’s worried about you, or trying to butter you up—

You only now notice you have been crying, as Nicolò turns himself over to face you, and brings his thumbs to your face, and kisses you.

“It’s OK,” he whispers. “I’m here. I’m with you.”

You clutch onto him for… you don’t know how long, but it’s long enough. Long enough that when he kisses you again, yawns, and screws his face up at the smell of himself, you’re feeling more at rest as he clambers out of the bed, strips, and disappears into the en-suite shower.

“I’ll go to the shop,” you tell him, switching back to Italian, poking your head around the door as he struggles with the shower controls. “Want anything?”

The water comes on, and he winces, his breath halted for a second by the sudden, scalding-hot jet in his face. Your own breath catches at the same time. Nicky never fails to do that to you.

“I won’t say no if they have chocolate.”

“Only the sweetest for you, my love,” you reply.

Nicky looks over his shoulder, with something under the wet mass of hair that _almost_ like a glare.

“You’re ridiculous, Yusuf,” he grins.

You wink, close the bathroom door, and collect your things. Key card. The iPhone with Copley’s specialist software on it. Your passport.

(It hadn’t been until you were about to enter the ferry terminal at Portsmouth that you had actually checked the counterfeit passport Copley had prepared for you. You’d shown it to Nicky, smirking.

“Joseph Jonas?” he had groaned. “And who am I, Nick Jonas?”

It wouldn’t have been the first time people assumed you were brothers, despite looking nothing like each other. But Nicky felt like he had picked the short straw when the UK Border Force officer, a blonde white woman in her 50s, had asked:

“Nicholas Campbell? Like the TV presenter?”

“Yeah,” he had replied, sheepishly, recalling a wiry Scotsman from British game shows in the 90s. “Like the TV presenter.”

“Can I buy a vowel, please, Nicky?” she had asked. Smiling, and then, after his blank stare, “sorry. You must get that all the time.”)

  


* * *

  


The shop aboard the ferry, as with all such shops aboard all such ferries, has a much better idea of itself than it really deserves. ‘Big savings’ on retail prices for nothing that you want. Rolex watches? Designer perfumes? Louboutin high heels? Souvenirs of the UK, tiny, plasticky statuettes of Big Ben, St. Paul’s, and a Routemaster bus, none to scale with each other?

(You are eager to forget this time in Britain. A country with an inflated sense of its own importance, falling back into its habitual bigotry and distrust of strangers, run by shadowy, avaricious men. And terrible at Eurovision.)

You focus on what you’re here for. A change of clothes, something to eat because you are starving, chocolate for Nicky because he deserves it, and because you need it.

You’re able to lay your hands on some t-shirts that are more like gym gear than street clothes, six pairs of socks, and a ‘gift set’ of seven pairs of boxer briefs. (You’d prefer looser shorts or briefs yourself, since close-fitting fabric gives you terrible jock itch, but assuming you’ll taking a week to get to Waddinxveen, bicycling or motorcycling or hitch-hiking, this will be better than going commando. There will be more opportunities to buy underpants.)

The ship’s café has closed, and your stomach still grumbles, impatiently. True, in the grand scheme of things, it won’t matter. But you want to sleep well tonight. You drop twenty euros on three giant sampler boxes of Ritter Sport, a total of 96 squares of chocolate.

“Merci,” you tell the cashier, and then, seeing the coffee machine behind her counter: “et deux chocolats chauds, s’il vous plaît.”

The cashier, apparently astonished that you speak any French, pushes the button on the machines, and produces two cups of scalding-hot, chocolate-flavoured water.

You are feeling too warm, and too stuffy, and it is giving you the shakes again. The stagnant air does not help. You guess every surface has been blitzed with disinfectant, and there are freshly-inserted hand sanitisers at regular intervals, with instructions on proper hand-washing.

The smell reminds you of Merrick Pharmaceuticals.

You have to sit out on the sundeck for a moment, although it’s close to midnight and freezing and the English Channel is whooshing under you, the fresh air and the smell of the sea helps you feel better.

The mental trauma, you tell yourself, will disappear, eventually. It _will_ heal up. It just needs more time, for you, than physical wounds. (Of course, some take longer to heal than others, and you can still practically feel the pang in Nicky’s chest any time he is reminded of his time in the Crusades.)

You spend the next ten minutes or so sat on the sundeck, drawing your hoodie and jacket around you, sipping hot chocolate, eating squares of Ritter Sport one by one, checking the news on your phone. **All of Italy placed under coronavirus lockdown. Actor Max Von Sydow dies aged 90.** You tap on **Chancery Lane office shootings “not terror-related”, says Met**. The working assumption of the police is that a disgruntled employee got into an argument with Merrick’s (illegal) private security team, and a bloodbath ensued. That’s probably far enough from the truth.

A scan of local Twitter reveals the usual suspects. The immediate assumption it was a terrorist attack. Men with football teams’ crests as avatars and conspiracy theorists claiming it’s a cover-up, that the (Muslim) mayor is imposing Sharia, and this all shows why they need to get out of the EU this very second.

Also floating on the trending topics list: a familiar name, **Gorham**. @BlackBikeBabeLDN’s tweet, “wonder what @GorhamFireSystems think of their driver shouting #homophobic abuse at a #gaycouple on #cyclesuperhighway8???” with pictures of the van, and of the driver’s ruddy, bulging face, has been retweeted 2,134 times. Gold Helmet (whose real name, you learn, is Chantelle) has been set upon by people with similar football avatars, a barrage of angry tweets: “didn’t happen.” “i bet they jumped a red light.” “So the cycling mafia want 2 destroy this man’s job and career U HYPOCRITE he just has an honest family to feed #EliteCapture #EthnicCleansing”.

If you keep reading, you will get angrier, and that’s not what you need. Instead, you send a link to the original tweet to Copley, and ask him to keep an eye on anything that might contain identifying information about either of you. You expect him to be asleep now. That’s fine. But you are still wary of him.

(You also look up Chantelle’s employer, and ask Copley to send her a bunch of flowers.)

Then you turn the phone off, use the ejector taped to the back to remove the SIM, then break it in two and throw it overboard when you’re sure no-one is watching. You’ll need a new one when you get to the mainland, but that’s for the future.

This is now, and you are feeling cold. The sea is frothing, and you’re suddenly more aware of the ship’s gentle back-and-forth motion in the Channel.

There is a shiver of something that might be seasickness… and might be a thought of Quỳnh. Still underwater. Still drowning every few minutes or so. Over four centuries.

You will pray for her at fajr, just before sunrise. Pray that Quỳnh will be freed, that God will bring her back to you, and to Andy. Because Andy is dying. It might take one year. It might take a hundred. But she deserves to have Quỳnh at her side, and Quỳnh deserves to be with Andromache.

Because if it happened to Nicky…

You find him sprawled on the lower bunk in the cabin, naked, skin still damp from the shower. Sleeping. The remote for the TV is still in his hand, as shapes dance across the screen: Nadiya Hussain’s Family Favourites, with signing and subtitles. On the screen, she blitzes chicken in a food processor, spreads it onto toast, coating it with sesame seeds. _“Prawns are really expensive,”_ says Nadiya, as do the subtitles, and the sign language interpreter.

You feel hungrier now, and at the same time bloated by the 17 squares of Ritter Sport you’ve eaten. And you don’t have a toothbrush. Something else for tomorrow. Maybe you’ll try the chicken-prawn toast recipe when you get to Waddinxveen.

(Maybe you’re hungry because he’s there, and Nicolò is your favourite person to have ever walked the earth, and you want to ravish him with kisses and bury yourself in his arms.)

You drop the shopping bag, and place the other paper cup of hot chocolate, and the remaining boxes of chocolates, on the desk in the cabin. Then you gently prise the remote from Nicky’s grasp, and turn off the TV before silently curling yourself into the bed beside him.

The gentle draw of his breath calms you for now. Yes, he’s still here. Yes, he’s still alive.

Yes, you can still survive this world, because you can survive it with him.

  


* * *

  


### Then: Mdina

Malta was one of the few places, in the twelfth century, when you didn’t feel as if you had the sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

You were now nearing your one hundred and thirty-second birthday, in the year the Franks called “the year of the Lord MCXCVIII.” It would be nearly a century since your first death. (Fifty-one years since Nicola had told you his name, and covered you with his cloak on the banks of the Ebro.)

And yet, you now felt as if you were running out of time. You had no idea how long this thing would last. Be it a blessing, or a curse, you did not want to lose it, for it to expire—for _you_ to expire, without seeing Nicola again.

“The Genovese would probably say Nicolò, not Nicola,” said Yaron, the book dealer, when you’d walked through his front door two weeks ago. He looked older than you thought it was possible for a man to look before death, with a frame that put him a head taller than you, and wise, black eyes. In your two years so far in Mdina, you’d heard that this man, in addition to selling cheap scribed copies of various holy books and philosophical treatises, had an _extensive_ network of contacts all throughout Europa, Arabia, and the Maghreb, and a habit of keeping his ear close to the ground. 

“Does that matter?” you’d asked.

“I assume your mother didn’t call you Yosef,” Yaron replied.

He had a point. You had been calquing and approximating your name into all manner of languages over the last few decades. And a slightly different vowel sound did not matter. What you wanted was to know where he was.

Two weeks ago, you’d given Yaron a sketch. His eyes had widened, and he had complimented you on your skills with parchment and graphite.

It was a sketch of Nicolò. You had captured his sharp chin, his nose, and made his hair a little ambiguous since you knew, from experience, that people looked very different with long and short hair. You were not sure you’d got his eyes right. But it was as close as you could get with the materials available to you.

(In reality, the form, proportions, and the use of shadow in your sketches was truly innovative for the time. You’d had more than enough time to practice.)

“I want to know where this man is,” you had told Yaron, surprising him with the fluency of your Hebrew. “We knew each other, a long time ago.”

“There are lots of Genovese called Nicolò,” the book dealer had replied. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to find this one. Unless you’re going to copy this sketch for me.”

You had already done so, and passed Yaron around sixty drawings of Nicolò, all on rolled-up parchment. Impressed, and wondering what on earth you would want with this man from Genoa, Yaron told you to come back in two weeks, promising to keep his ear close to the ground.

“I did manage to find something,” he said now, after sunset. You were both seated at a table inside his premises, and your foot was tapping against the floor, restless. You had waited too long for this moment.

“Tell me,” you said.

“It’s not good news,” Yaron said, after a long pause. “I’m sorry.”

Your heart sank, but you needed to know.

“Tell me. I need to know what happened to him.”

Yaron drew in breath, bracing himself for a fiery reaction, and said:

“There was a man, called Nicholas, with Richard of England’s army at Acre. There were suggestions that he attempted to defect to Saladin at around the time of the Ayyadieh massacre. He was then re-captured by Richard’s Crusaders and put to death.”

You blinked. Hearing it put into words like that—so precise, so impersonal—

“He’s not dead,” you said, blankly.

“I know this is hard news for you to take in. I assume you knew him, and that you were—”

“He _is not_ dead,” you repeated.

“I wish it wasn’t so,” replied Yaron, “I truly do. I can see how dear he was to you. And I’ve been in this world long enough to be tired of all the bloodshed.”

Not as long as you.

Words would get you nowhere with this man, so you sighed, grimaced, and told him not to make a sound.

Yaron yelped and jumped backwards as you pulled the knife from your waistband and plunged it into your free hand. You grunted with pain as you pulled it out again, and rested it on the table—and the old man stared as the divot in your palm shrunk and flattened.

“What are you?” he asked, staring with wonder, terror, confusion, awe—

“I don’t know what I am, sir,” you replied.

Yaron’s eyes flitted back across the table, where he had laid out one of the sketches you had given him. (Nicolò’s chin was spattered with drops of your blood.)

You sat, trying to divine what was going on behind this old man’s eyes. You were expecting him to accuse you of witchcraft, or simply to run—

“He’s like you, isn’t he?” Yaron said, finally. “This Nicolò. He is like you.”

You didn’t say anything, allowing him to fill in the gaps:

“There was a Nicolò di Genova a century ago, one who deserted at the siege of Jerusalem. Forty-eight years later, another. Nicolò, son of Nicolò, joined the crusade to Iberia… and again, he just disappeared at Tortosa. The description seems to match these sketches of yours. ”

You bounced your head in affirmation.

“I need to know that he is safe,” you stated, plainly. “He is the only man I have known who is anything _remotely_ like me.”

Yaron nodded. And then inhaled, knowing he would have no choice but to deliver more bad news:

“There is a rumour about a man like you,” he said. “It emerged around a year ago. Somewhat gruesome.”

Your heart feels as if it is about to stop, but again, you gesture your assent.

“Do you know of the island of Bisentina on Lago di Bolsena?”

You didn’t, and here Yaron went to fetch something, wiped your spots of blood from the table, and unfurled a map of the Papal States, pointing to a lake north of Roma.

“On this island, there is an establishment called Malta dei Papi. It’s where the Church puts its heretical clergy when it doesn’t want them to be heard again.”

“Is he a clergyman?” you asked.

“Unlikely. Clergy don’t like to get their hands bloody,” replied Yaron. “However. _However._ There is a tale from this island of a prisoner who would not die. Taken there to be put to death, and they couldn’t do it. No matter what they tried, he would endure.”

“Such as?”

“You _don’t_ want to know,” Yaron said, his eyes hardening into a glare.

You did want to know, but you knew you would not like it. (When you did eventually learn the different methods of execution attempted on the Bisentina Crusader, it would make you physically sick.)

“You’ve been very helpful,” you told Yaron. “Thank you—”

“Tell me,” he said—clearly showing no interest in ending this transaction here. “How do you know him?”

You were minded to hand over your bag of silver now, and be done with it, and work out how you would get to Bisentina and work out if this was the same person—

“I am older than I look, sir,” you said. “Fifty-one years ago I was at Tortosa.”

Yaron did not seem surprised by this. And his eye seemed to twinkle as you continued:

“I recognised him, because I was also at Antioch and at Jerusalem, and we’d killed each other. Scores upon scores of times. And it never worked. We both walked away.”

“And then, fifty years later…”

“What do you know of my faith, Master Yaron?”

Yaron appeared glad that you’d asked rather than assuming he knew nothing. “I know my Lord is the same as your God. When you get to my age, you learn to look past little differences.” And here he faltered a little, and asked: “how old _are_ you?”

“By your measure,” you replied, the arithmetic churning quickly in your head to re-calculate the date in the Hebrew calendar, “I was born in the year 4827. The Franks would call it year 1066.” You added: “I feel much the same about the differences.”

Yaron smiled. And then he said:

“It is as I say to people, Christians—Franks, you would call them—who come here hoping to learn Latin in the hope they will receive the word of the Lord directly, and it shall make them more pious. I tell them, prepare for a shock. They read the Bible then they’re surprised by what’s not in it.”

You guessed the same went for the Qu’ran.

“There is a story,” you said, “that after the first revelation to the Prophet, that he returned home to Khadija—peace and blessings upon them both. And she covered him with a blanket, he was terrified, and she told him, she reassured him that the Almighty would protect him from any harm. Always.”

(You felt to your lap, where you carried Nicolò’s cloak, ready to be slung over your neck and worn on your way out of here. It was threadbare, now, and ragged on the edges, but you refused to part with it because it was the only thing that proved to you that that night in Tortosa was not a fever dream.)

“He did the same for me. I was sure I would die, and when I woke up, he covered me and cared for me. That’s who he is.”

Yaron paused, briefly, as he decided whether he wanted to broach the subject:

“Khadija was married to the Prophet, was she not?”

Another thing that a hundred or so years had drummed out of you was any shame that you were like this.

“Yes,” you replied. “Blessings upon them both, they were husband and wife.”

“I see,” Yaron nodded. A faint smile forming.

You stood, ready to depart, and placed Yaron’s payment on the table—

“Absolutely _not_ ,” he said. “I refuse.”

“You have helped me. This was the agreed price,” you replied, too tired to consider haggling—

“It’s free.”

That silenced you for a moment.

“Master Yaron,” you replied, on the wrong foot, “what on earth do you mean, ‘free?’”

“I mean, I won’t accept this. We agreed upon it without my having knowledge of your circumstance,” Yaron insisted. “Had I known—”

“This means nothing,” you replied. “Take the money.”

“Take it yourself, Yosef,” the old man said, his voice rising into a command. “As the Romans would say, it is pro bono publicum. I _shall not_ invoice you for your own happiness, boy.”

 _Boy???_ you wanted to respond—but you took the bag back, and found your hands were shaking, and there seemed to be a hot vacuum in your throat.

“Thank you,” you said, breathing back tears, and departed. Unable to articulate how grateful you felt to this man.

You were barely around the corner, wandering, stunned, through the narrow streets of Mdina, when, as you turned into the Jewish silk market, a man dressed head-to-toe in black stepped out in front of you.

“Yusuf al-Kaysani?” he demanded, his Arabic pronunciation impeccable.

He barely waited for you to acknowledge him before you felt a sharp pain in the centre of your chest, and died.

  


* * *

  


He was, in fact, a she, and her name was Quỳnh. (You did check, because you wanted to get it right, and asked whether Quỳnh was simply dressed as a man just for now because it was convenient, or in fact _was_ a man who some people refused to accept as such. “I am a woman, if that’s what you’re asking,” she’d replied.)

After overcoming your initial anger at being run through the heart, you came around to Quỳnh pretty quickly: she was sharp, cunning, and spoke Tunisian Derja perfectly, as well as classical Arabic and the many Levantine dialects. She promised to teach you her native Việt tongue one day.

Her friend, Andromache, was a different presence. Altogether more saturnine, matter-of-fact, and brooding.

On the ship that would take you through the Strait of Messina and along the Tyrrhenian Sea, skirting the coastline so as to be _just_ out of sight, Andromache explained the situation in a way that made you think she had done this before.

_We are a group of immortals. There are only two of us now. There were three, but Lykon died. The immortality is not permanent, and we don’t know when or why it stops. You are much too young for this to be a problem for now._

“You were dreaming of me?” you asked when she had finished.

“Every damn night for ninety-nine years,” Andromache replied. “But we’ve found you now. That won’t be a problem.”

“But if you were dreaming of me…” you said—

And here you trailed off, because the two of them could fill in the gaps.

“We tried looking for him,” Quỳnh said. “Believe me, we tried. And we won’t stop.”

They were doing better than you, then. You had been drifting between professions and vocations for a century, disappearing when the neighbours grew suspicious of your inability to age.

You had abandoned Nicolò, and for that, you were sure, you would feel eternally guilty.

“We killed each other,” you told Quỳnh and Andromache, ashamed as you remembered the gory details of Nicolò’s various deaths at your hand, back in Antioch, back in Jerusalem. “I shouldn’t have let him go. I should have followed him.”

Quỳnh opened her mouth like she was about to say something comforting, but Andromache got there first:

“We’ll get him. Maybe not straight away. But we _will_ find him and we will get him back, soon.”

“He’ll want to kill me,” you said. “I certainly won’t be able to _work_ with him, or whatever it is you people do.”

“I don’t think you’ll have a choice,” replied Quỳnh. “And besides. If he kills you, it’s not permanent.”

“Trust us,” Andromache cut in. “We’re the only two people you’ve ever met at any length who are like you. You’ll learn to live with him.”

And that made you want to punch a hole in the side of the boat, because _no_ , these women did not understand that it was more than just your shared (and apparently temporary) immortality that bound you to Nicolò of Genoa—

“You are not like me,” you insisted. “I am sorry. But you won’t understand.”

Quỳnh looked to Andromache, rolling her eyes, and then, briefly, back at you.

And then, she and Andromache kissed.

Your jaw went slack, as the two of them threw themselves over each other, lips crashing together as the ship rocked in the waves, caressing faces and clutching garments and giggling and—

For what must have been the first time in your long life, you saw someone truly like you. _Two_ people like you. Happy. Unafraid. Unashamed. Together.

This must have been what it was like for most people, to see themselves in others. Your chest ached with desire for what Andromache and Quỳnh had in each other.

And after you’d pulled yourself together, you said:

“I know where to find him.”

  


* * *

  


### To Come: The Bering Sea

It will take you two hours, and at least three deaths, until you manage to haul Nicky, limp, aboard _MS Jelling_.

Under the fluorescent lights inside the cabin, he will look more dead than you’ll have ever seen him. Skin drained and blue. Eyes wide open. Hair frosted through with ice.

You will be haunted, but you will carry on, because then, like always, you’ll need him back.

You’ll peel away his soaking, freezing clothing, although you will do it with almost no sensation in your trembling fingers. Past experience should tell you that you need to deal with your own hypothermia first before helping anyone else, but that won’t matter. It can’t matter.

_You. Need. To. Get. Him. Back._

Once you’ve dried him, laid him on his back, and covered him in an insulated blanket, you will rest your forehead against his, and clutch his wrist, checking for a pulse, and whisper.

“Come on, Nicolò. _Come on._ ” It will almost be like a prayer.

He will not wake.

There will be no pulse.

You will notice that your own fingertips are blue, and that moving your joints is excruciating as blood circulation resumes, and none of it will matter, as you begin chest compressions, and rescue breaths, because you’re not going to let him drown over and over again while his body figures itself.

You’ll be checking your watch. Four minutes out of the water. Compressions. Mouth-to-mouth.

Nine minutes. Compressions. Mouth-to-mouth.

 _Come on,_ you will imagine saying, as you have no breath to say it to him because you’ll be busy trying to re-start his heart.

Twelve.

Fourteen, and your arms will be burning with effort, and you will be unable to lock them in a straight line because you’ll be shivering too much—

You will think to yourself, as you trace your fingers over Nicolò’s beautiful jawline, his blue-tinged lips, his perfect, ice-blue eyes inert and looking at something beyond this world… _this is all your fault,_ you’ll think, and tremor, and reason if only you’d not pulled on that rope when you should’ve waited for him to brace it, if only you’d exercised some damn caution and not just yanked open that oxygen line—

Nicky’s first gasp intake will be so violent that he practically bucks forward, slamming his forehead into yours, and coughing hot brine into your face.

It will be the most beautiful pain you’ve felt all day. You’ll need to take a few seconds to breathe, to re-set your broken nose, and then to kiss Nicky on the forehead.

“Stay where you are, Nicolò,” you’ll whisper, knowing he’ll be too delirious to understand what’s happening. “You’re on _Jelling_. You’re safe. Nile and Andy are coming.”

His eyes will dart around, confused, trying to focus on something— _anything_ —

“Look at me, Nicolò.” You will hold his cheeks with your hands (still trembling), and wondering, god forbid, what if he’s suffered some kind of permanent brain damage, or if he was gone so long that he…

“You—” he’ll manage, on around three hurried, gasping breaths—

“Breathe normal, babe. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

“You— you— yu—”

“Ssssshhh,” you’ll hiss, and he—

His breath will foam as he coughs up more water, and more, and more, and his pain will make you angry with yourself for allowing this to happen—

And then, just like that, he’ll stabilise. Turned onto his front, skin bright pink where it had been an unpleasant blue-purple a moment before.

You and he will both breathe a sigh of blessed relief at the same time.

(Under all this, your adrenaline will still be pumping, and there will be a nagging voice that you need to finish what you started.)

You’ll make sure Nicky is comfortable first. You’ll unpack the change of clothes from your backpacks, and leave them laid out near the heater. Then, the food. A bottle of water. Two chocolate bars. A bag of peanuts. A bunch of bananas. From experience, once he’s calmed down, he will be starving.

 _“Talk to me, Joe,”_ Copley will say.

“He’s alive,” will be your reply. “He’s OK.”

There will be a whoosh of breath down the radio. Relief.

 _“Andy and Nile are two hours from Fairbanks,”_ he will add. _“Expect them in three hours and thirty.”_

“We might not have three hours and thirty,” you will say. And as you glance through the porthole, at where _NS Surprise, Bitch_ hangs in the ocean: “I’m going to cross back over and disable those warheads.”

Copley will sound alarmed. _“Are you sure?”_

“If those things are remotely operable they could go off any moment,” you’ll insist. “You saw their website. They’ve got a contract with the US State Department. Three days to election day. We need to stop it before someone tries something.”

_“Do you seriously think they’d launch a nuclear attack just before an election?”_

“They’ve been abducting people off the streets,” you’ll reply. “It’s what fascists do. Rattle the sabre before the election to look tough, or manufacture an emergency.”

Copley will take in a breath to argue, but no argument will come.

He knows how long you and Nicky have been around. He knows that any unprecedented horror his generation lives through, you have seen with your own eyes, dozens of times before. The Sack of Constantinople. The witch trials. The invasion and colonisation of the Americas, of Australia, the subjugation of Africa. The creation of concentration camps by the British in the Boer War. The desperate brinksmanship of the Manhattan Project and the Cuban Missile Crisis. History does not repeat, but it rhymes.

  


* * *

  


In some alternate future where The Old Guard are not there, this is what might happen.

The administration of a nuclear power— _any_ administration, it doesn’t matter where—getting concerned it will shortly get voted out or removed by a coup d’état, will seek to tilt fortune their way with a show of strength. Any administration that reacts in this way will have enemies, ones whom they have not even attempted to make amends with.

Its military will have something to say about that. As morally repugnant as you find most military forces (and you should know, having fought with and against an extensive selection over a millennium) you will concede that, in most cases, they will not do something that _could_ bring about a nuclear winter in an attempt to make their paymasters look tough.

This is where damocles.ai enters. No ethics policy, no qualms, no bullshit. Pay, fire, and forget.

Of course, a nuclear weapon exploding 30km from the shore of (for instance) Hong Kong, or Tiangjing, or Wonsan, will not be risk-free. There is a real chance that an incoming ICBM will be taken as more than the warning shot it is, and that they will retaliate. Mutually assured destruction.

Everything will be wiped away.

All of you have had enough nightmares. You will _not_ allow them to come to pass.

Not today.

  


* * *

  


Nicky will have fallen asleep on _MS Jelling_ , and Andy and Nile will be back in contact, crossing the Bering Strait in a rickety helicopter they managed to commandeer, when you hear something aboard _NS Surprise, Bitch_ that makes you jump.

A buzzing noise. Rhythmic. Almost like a folk dance, or a data stream, interfering with your radio.

“Copley,” you will whisper, as if the missiles can hear you, “I think I just heard a mobile phone signal on my earpiece.”

A pause.

 _“Say again?”_ Copley will ask, clearly hesitant.

“I think I just heard interference. Like an incoming GPRS signal. I just heard interference on my earpiece. I think it’s coming from the rocket,” and as you say it, you’ll realise what that means, as Copley realises it too—

 _“OK. Don’t panic,”_ he will reply, as panic whirls in your head.

_One of these rockets could launch right now. The world could end by this time tomorrow._

You’ll be on the main cargo deck, in the container that you’ll now know is more of a pillbox, with a soldering iron. The square you cut out of the missile’s fuselage will be what you kneel on, as you tentatively connect an adapter to a PCB, a daughter board to a larger PCB with jumper wires connecting it to the warhead.

You will be fighting back the tremors in your hand, from the cold, from the inescapable fear that if you do something wrong it will send the whole world up in flames. Nile will have confirmed your suspicion that if you just cut the cable, the warhead will detonate in a ‘fail-deadly’ configuration.

“This rocket could launch any moment,” you will say.

 _“I know,”_ Copley will say. _“I’m checking.”_

 _“Blow it up,”_ Andy will suggest. _“Just stick a timer on it, get in the dinghy, get away.”_

“There may not be time for that.”

Over the last two hours, of delicate disconnections, gentle unwelding, of throwing the helm controls to move _MS Vejle/NS Surprise, Bitch_ so that she was out of fallout range of habitable areas if any of the warheads detonated, of having the sword of Damocles hanging over your head…

You will have convinced yourself.

 _“Give me some time,”_ Copley will say, desperately.

And then a new voice will crackle onto the radio, and ask:

_“Joe? What’s going on?”_

And then, before you can explain anything, Nicky will look out of the porthole, and switch to Italian, and demand:

_“Oh, come on, Joe! For fuck’s sake! What have you done with the dinghy? And the ship?”_

“I’ve moved them out of the way,” you’ll reply. “I think one of these warheads is about to try and launch.”

 _“English, please, boys,”_ Nile will chime in, _“think of Mr Copley—”_

 _“Oh no, Joe, don’t you dare—”_ Nicky will continue, in Italian, and you’ll be able to picture it in your head, because you know what he’s like when he’s pissed off, that taciturn façade vanishes and he is enraged because this is just between the two of you— _“Don’t tell me you’re seriously thinking about doing this, my heart! Come on!”_

You will want to shut him down, to shout, to tell him “there’s no fucking _choice_ , Nicolò!” because you know he’s getting worked up, his hands will be flailing, his skin will be turning pink, and—

And you’ll already be thinking about how this will work. How you expect the death will be quick, but excruciating. You have never been burned to this extent, or dissolved into your constituent atoms before.

And then, how will your regeneration even work? Will you just appear somewhere, floating in the Bering Sea? What if your vaporised remains get launched into space? Do you then become space debris?

Will you regenerate at all?

The thought of Quỳnh, drowning every three minutes for five hundred years, will weigh heavily on your old shoulders, as you wonder what it’s like to drown in a vacuum—

 _“Not like this, Yusuf,”_ Nicky will now be pleading, in the oldest flavour of Derja he can summon, _“please! Wait for me. I’ll bring the ship over. We can do this together!”_

And there will be a minefield of crosstalk, from Copley, from Nile, from Andy, from Nicky’s desperate pleas:

_“Their server instance looks like it’s crashed—”_

_“You’re immortal, not indestructible, Joe—”_

_“Can’t you just find the antenna and cover it with some foil?”_

_“Yusuf, please, I can’t be in this world without you—”_

_“Just blow the motherfucker up!”_

_“There’s gotta be another way—”_

_“What if you pulled out the fuel lines from the other ones, then there’s no way they could launch—”_

_“We’re twenty minutes away, hang in there, Nicky—”_

and so you will let out a _roar_ , animal, inhumane, furious, because _no_. It is not fair. It should not be like this.

But you’ll have no choice.

Silence will fall on the radio, save for one person’s uneven, desperate breathing.

You will need to get this over with, quickly.

“Don’t cry, Nicolò, my darling,” you will tell him, in Genoese, even as you feel stoppered tears rising from your own face. “I’m coming back.”

 _“You might not,”_ he will reply.

“If there was something I could do about that, babe, I would.” The words will come out with a loose, uneven tremolo, because, truth be told, as much as you still want to believe in the Almighty, and that God had a reason to bring you and Nicolò together, and He would never tear you apart before your times—

(There are so many words, over the best part of a millennium, that no longer need to be given shape with sound or voice, because they are just there.

That is what your love for this man is. Understanding. He knows you. Were this the other way round, you know it would be _you_ pleading tearfully over the radio now, as Nicolò, ever the brave one, ever the one who’s willing to make the hard decision, to put himself in harm’s way, to put himself between you and danger——————)

_“I’m so proud of you, Joe.”_

Those six little words will take your breath away, such that it barely registers with you that he has switched to English.

_“I’m so, so proud I know you. You are the kindest, loveliest man I’ve ever met. I am so glad I know you. I am so glad I love you.”_

“Stop it,” you’ll say, “you’re going to make me cry,” although it’ll be well past that point—

_“You’re magical, Yusuf. The biggest blessing was never an eternal life. My blessing was that you came into it. That we spent eternity together.”_

Of all the ways to go, this won’t be a bad one. With a giant, teary grin on your face.

It will sound on the radio as if someone, maybe Copley, is crying.

 _“Thank you, Yusuf,”_ Nicolò will say, his voice wobbling, yet proud. _“I am so glad to be your husband.”_

(Even after all these centuries, the word ‘husband’ will sound so peculiar, and transactional, because despite all times you have pledged him your troth, what you have together is above and beyond.)

“Thank you, my love,” you’ll reply. “You make this world survivable. I adore you.”

And then, you’ll take a deep breath, as you hear Copley’s fingers making furious machine-gun keystrokes—

“Everyone,” you’ll say. “I don’t know if I’m going to survive this. If not—actually, _whether or not_ I come back, tell Booker I forgive him. And I’m sorry for being an ass, and I’m sorry for not understanding him, and I’m sorry I let him down, and tell him I said I love you.”

(Even now, you will wish more than anything that you could have gone back to the beach on the Thames, and agreed with Nile to let him off with an apology, and hugged him, and promised you’d look after him better and not let him get to this state again—)

“And Quỳnh, too. When you find her.” Not if. When. This will now be an affirmation. A declaration. “Bless you all. Whenever, wherever—Andy, I pray you’re wrong, because I think we’ll see each other again.”

 _“We’ll find you, Joe,”_ Andy will say, in Derja. _“No matter how long it takes. I am not losing you like I lost Quỳnh.”_

“And look after Nicky!” That’ll be sharpened. An order. “Look after him. He overflows with sagacity, and virtue, and patience, and compassion. You will not insult my memory. Nicolò is my everything. If I don’t survive this, you will make damn sure he does!”

 _“This can’t be happening!”_ Andy insists.

Nile, breathing deeply, will say:

_“Good luck, Joe. See you on the other side.”_

“Good luck, Nile.”

_“As-salamu alaykum.”_

A smile will crack on your face. In the mirrored surface of the missile fuselage, you will catch sight of your reflection. You’ve never considered yourself that attractive, but Nicolò has made you feel like you and he are the most beautiful thing in the world together. And, at nine hundred and fifty-four, if this is the end, you won’t look bad for your age.

If this is the end.

“Wa ʿalaykumu s-salām, Nile,” you will say. And then, to Nicolò: “a presto, amore mio.”

You will grit your teeth, squeeze your eyes shut, and give the jumper cable connecting the daughter board to the warhead a gentle tug.

There will be an almost silent click, the switching of relays.

  
  
  
  


The world will turn to white.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Everything will be wiped away.


	3. Hindsight, 2020

### To Come: Chilworth

There will never have been any order to fire the missiles on _NS Surprise, Bitch_.

This will come out as the Old Guard sits in James Copley’s study in Chilworth, Surrey. He will have driven them up from the airfield at Popham in silence, with Nicky’s breathing all that Andy and Nile could focus on.

“I think there never was a launch order,” Copley will tell them. “I was trying to check, but their EC2 instance crashed.”

It will corroborate the account from the San Francisco police department and California state attorney. The damocles.ai nuclear ship _Surprise, Bitch_ did detonate one warhead, but it was a result of a manufacturing defect, rather than anyone actually attempting to rain down nuclear armageddon. Although, that said, why does the US State Department have contracts with a company that has illegal nuclear weapons, and apparently non-existent safety protocols and sloppy engineering?

(There will, mercifully, be a change in management of the United States of America soon.)

“But he heard something,” Nicky will say, and the sound of his voice at the nadir of its range will _haunt_ Nile. You were right: Nicky is the loveliest man in the world. But after your death, he will look and sound to her like a husk.

“People hear cell phone interference on radios all the time,” Nile will say. “It was probably the radio itself. Or maybe the missile was just syncing its clock. Maybe it was the burner phone he was going to use as a timer.” And she will demonstrate, by putting her own phone on top of one of Copley’s hi-fi speakers. Sure enough, a rhythmic buzzing sound, almost like a digital polka, comes through the speakers.

Nicky will nod, silent.

“He panicked, he thought the world was about to end, and he stopped it,” Copley will add, looking ill. He’ll glance at Nicky, and say: “I am sorry.”

(Everyone will have told him some variation on that, repeatedly, over the last six days. The heiress who booked the Old Guard for this job in the first place, Hilde Ragnarsen, had signed a cheque in Danish kroner that might have been a telephone number, and had also sent an enormous bouquet of white flowers to Copley’s home.)

“This changes nothing,” Nile will say. “We carry on. We find him.”

“It’s been three weeks,” Andy will growl, her forehead resting on her fingers.

“And, boss?” Nile will be infuriated. “Whatever happened to no man left behind?”

“Like Quỳnh?” Andy will glare. “Like Booker?”

(They will not have succeeded in making contact with Booker to pass on your dying message of forgiveness. A visit to his apartment in Paris will have proven fruitless. He won’t be there.)

“You might be willing to accept that,” Nile will say. “But I’m not.”

“Maybe,” Copley will suggest, in an attempt to defuse the tension, “we should go downstairs and get a cup of tea.”

Your Nicolò will be sat in the corner, concentrating on the will to take his next breath.

Nile and Andy will nod their agreement. Nicky will stand, like an old man, as if his body retains its wear and tear from every one of his nine hundred and fifty-one years.

  


* * *

  


“You might not think this, Nicky,” Nile will say to him, a few hours later, as they sit in Copley’s gazebo in the chilly November rain, “but you’re doing amazingly coping with all this.”

Nile, it will turn out over the months you know her, is a passable guitarist, and a better singer. The pandemic will stop you putting this to the test against your falsetto or Nicky’s almost choral harmonisation skills. But she has a few videos she uploaded online in high school, nine-year-old videos of an eighteen-year-old Nile singing Beyoncé, Prince, and Robyn in her bedroom. (These even had some nominal viral success, but only once she had been declared KIA and the local press had found her YouTube account.)

That’s what will draw Nicky out here, into Copley’s otherwise rather miserable and unkempt garden, as Nile strums a pleasant three-note tune, and sings almost under her breath. He will bury himself, sullen, in his woollen sweater, as she runs through the verses, and the choruses, again and again, in no particular order, a simple lyric easy to lose yourself in.

_“Can I tell you something, just between you and me? When I hear your voice, I know I’m finally free. Every single word is perfect as it can be… and I need you, here with me.”_

Nicky will have a descant in his mind, and hum it under his breath. The last time the two of you were in Malta was just last year, for his nine hundred and fiftieth birthday. After Nicky had drunk rather too many glasses of wine at a karaoke bar in St. Julian’s, he goaded you into serenading him with this exact song. Nicky had then joined in for the last chorus, and kissed you at the end.

(It was rare for the two of you to have a moment in the sun like this. There had been a blur of applause, cheering, and drunken patrons cooing at how wholesomely in-love this mysterious couple was. On your way out, one drunk and desperately horny young man had asked, not possibly knowing how true his assessment of you was, “room for one more, daddy?”)

Nicky will think of those bright lights, the taste of the wine, and your voice singing those lyrics. _I need you here with me._

Nile will apologise profusely when he explains why he’s crying. “I’m so sorry, Nicky. I didn’t realise—oh, lord,” she will say, and put her guitar aside, and gently draw him into a hug.

That’s how it will stay for a while. He will sniff, and smile, and apologise as well, for ruining her flow and interrupting. He will thank her, for reminding him of a beautiful moment with you.

“We will find him,” Nile insists. “I promise. We need to keep our eyes open.”

Your Nicolò will nod, wordlessly.

And then, Nile will ask: “would you like to pray together, Nicky?”

He will nod, one Christian to another, and gesture to Nile that she can lead.

They will both close their eyes.

“Dear Lord, we pray that You will mend our broken hearts. Please watch over Yusuf, and bless him with Your love and adoration, as he loved and adored all those around him.”

And then she will look at Nicky, and feel as if she’s overstepping the mark, as she pleads to God:

“Please, Lord. Our saviour. You blessed us with his presence for so long. Please. Save him. Bring him back to us. Amen.”

Nicky will nod, not sure if God is listening, and echo, “amen.”

  


* * *

  
  


You will still be dead.

  
  


* * *

  


### Then: Malta dei Papi, Bisentina

You felt like an utter, irredeemable fool, as you knelt on the floor of your cell in Malta dei Papi, having been captured.

This had _not_ been part of the plan. You had been told to wait by the entrance to the cave, concealed, whilst Andromache and Quỳnh prepared a gunpowder concoction to blow the prison open. “Wait for the signal,” Quỳnh had said.

And then, you’d sneezed, as one of the Church’s armed guards passed en route to the latrine.

He had tried to kill you, of course, screaming oaths in Latin and Greek, calling you a foul word only the Europeans ever called your brown-skinned brothers and sisters from the other side of the Mediterranean. _Thieves. Plunderers. Cast out by Sara._

And then you’d ended up here. Shackled. On your knees. Wondering which way Makkah was, because right now, you needed a miracle, and you closed your eyes, and pleaded, in an incoherent rage with God.

Whether or not Nicolò was here, or had _ever_ been here, it was surely a matter of time before the masters of this place, whatever branch of the clergy it was, worked out that you were the same kind of cursed, deathless beast.

You did not even know what you would say to him, assuming he was here. Your Latin was much better than it was, and you had made an effort to learn Genoese Ligurian to a conversational level. But what do you even say in such a situation?

You guessed you’d have a lot of time to work it out. If nothing else, that was what you’d have.

(“There’s a reason we avoid capture,” Andromache had said. “There is literally no way out.”)

A nagging voice in your head told you that maybe this was part of a test. Some punishment for being led astray, for your century-long obsession with the infidel from Genoa. In the search for him, you were now brought within striking distance of Nicolò di Genova—probably—but could never see him, and never talk to him.

(Dante would not write his seminal _Inferno_ for centuries to come, but you were still aware, from the amount of Latin texts you had haltingly read, of the concept of contrapasso, punishment resembling or in contrast to the sin itself.)

They had taken everything from you. Your saif. Your knife. The sketch you carried of Nicolò. His cloak. Everything but the braies tied around your waist. The cell, barely large enough for you to lie on the floor and stretch yourself out, was cut into the cave that formed Malta dei Papi, and the only reminder to you that you had not died and gone to Hell was a single shaft of light outside the cell door, crawling with the progression of the day. By now, it had turned bright orange, and that told you that you had now been imprisoned for…

Too long.

 _Does it really matter?_ you asked yourself. _Day one of infinity. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things._

You squeezed your eyes shut, depriving yourself of the last signifier of the passage of time.

“Please, God,” you began, a breath whisper version of the maghrib prayer. “Please, oh clement one. Give us this—”

And then, the signal came.

The heavens exploded, and you felt a searing pain in your eyes, and a burning in your chest from the smoke and the shrapnel and the rocky fragments, and—

Maybe this time _was_ the end, you almost hoped. You were hungry. Parched. Not that starving to death would be permanent, but you were in no state to fight—

There was the crashing of armoured footsteps, a loud, almost too-sweet blare of an alarm horn, and shadows moving down the corridor, casting shadows in the dust.

You dared not sit upright, or attempt to stand, lest you draw attention to yourself and one of the guards run you through for the hell of it—

And then, five _whooshes_ in quick succession, and thumps as the arrows struck their targets. Two of the guards went down at once. One staggered forwards, fell onto his knees, and then his front, driving the arrowhead through his own back with a spurt of blood.

Could this be—

A call came from above, in a voice you had only known for two days since effectively being abducted on Malta, but right now, almost the best sound you could imagine hearing:

_“Go!”_

That was Quỳnh, who leapt from above, into the fresh channel she had blown into Malta dei Papi. She scanned the cells one by one, and you did not even have time to make a parched cry for help before she tapped the side of your cell door with her sword.

“Andromache! Here!”

Andromache followed a few seconds later, as Quỳnh sprinted ahead, using the bodies of the guards as stepping stones and charging her way into the bowels of the prison. Andromache stepped back, swung her labrys at the bolt, and hauled the door open.

“I’m sorry,” you began saying, in Greek.

She reciprocated by slamming her labrys into your shackles, breaking your wrists at the same time as freeing them.

“We’ll talk about that later,” she insisted, as you howled in pain. She softened, though, for a moment, placing her free hand on your shoulder.

Slowly, _too_ slowly, your radiuses re-formed themselves, and creaked back into place.

“You still with me, Yusuf?” Andromache asked.

You clambered to your feet, and, feeling like it was something you had to do, hugged her around the middle. Shaking.

“It’s OK,” she said, gently—as gently as Andromache could ever manage. “I’m here.”

She offered you a water skin, which you guzzled the contents of before standing, and asking: “What next?”

She handed you a skeleton key she was carrying at her waist.

“Reckon you’re up for a jailbreak?”

“I don’t think I have much choice,” you replied.

“There’s an armoury at the other end of this corridor and down the stairs,” she said. “Free as many as you can. Then get yourself dressed. We’ll find the other one.”

 _He’s called Nicolò,_ you wanted to protest, but didn’t have the breath to do it.

You set about using the skeleton key to unbolt the doors, and free the shackles on the imprisoned clergymen. One by one. Some of these people looked _old_ —maybe it was being underfed, or being kept out of natural light, only let out to piss and shit, but the smell here made you want to retch and yet you kept going, because these people, dammit…

These people needed your help.

“Thank you,” one man sobbed in a tongue you only vaguely understood, barely a deathly-white skin stretched over a skeleton, clutching you as you lifted him upright. “The Lord must have sent you. _Thank you_ , young man. I shall not forget this. God bless you.”

 _I’m not young,_ you wanted to answer, knowing you were probably old enough to be this man’s father, or grandfather. But that was beside the point.

And then you heard thumping from further down the corridor, and moved faster. Fourteen men, two women, and one man you knew the guards had insisted on calling a woman despite his protestations to the contrary.

You were just helping the last prisoner, a young, dark-skinned man who looked like he might’ve been your brother a long time ago, when an arrowhead ricocheted off the cell door.

You swore, in Derja, and the prisoner looked at you, quizzically, as if he recognised the word.

“Wait here,” you said, and charged.

You got almost within striking distance of the guard’s feet before he fired again, this time hitting you in the belly, and you tumbled forwards, smarting, wincing—

and that didn’t matter.

Time would heal that. You would walk out of here. The others would not.

You pulled the arrow free of your flesh, and used it to stab the guard just below the knee, before taking his knife and using it to finish him off.

You let yourself breathe for a few moments, fumbling at your thorax, feeling warm, wet blood, and smelling iron, and then a smooth surface, and knowing that that was a cue to _go._

You stood upright, turned about, and turned the sharp corner in the corridor, descended a staircase so cramped it made your head spin.

You heard footsteps, and took that as a sign to speed up, and the guard who met you started, alarmed by the momentum you held as you sprinted downwards, and _charged_ at his legs—

  


* * *

  


The thirty seconds or so for which your neck was broken by the fall were not pleasant.

  


* * *

  


You raised yourself again after sensation returned in the rest of your body. There was a little wobble as you stood upright, but no matter: you were already there. An open door to a small, round room, which, you assumed, was the armoury.

There were others here. Three of the clergymen you had just freed, pulling robes around themselves and clumsily taking knives, one of the female priests swinging a sword back and forth to assess its weight and motion, and one man clutching a red cloak that sat atop a chest, blue eyes keenly examining a piece of parchment he had uncovered—

Your breath vanished.

Nicolò di Genova seemed stunned by the sight of his own face, committed to parchment and graphite.

You were stunned by the sight of Nicolò di Genova, after half a century, and half a century before that—

such that you _almost_ did not hear the growl from the guard behind you, and the clanking of sabatons against a stone floor.

Nicolò, however, did.

He sprung to his feet, and lunged between you and your assailant.

There was a terrible squelching sound, and a _gasp_ of shock from the assembled clergy, and a crunch of bone and spurt of blood and sinew as the guard’s sword struck Nicolò in the shoulder, exposing bone, exposing muscle, and sending him backwards to the ground.

 _No you don’t, you piece of shit,_ you thought, charging for the guard’s middle, and wresting the sword from his grasp, and grappling, and closing your fists, and pummelling him in the face, once, twice, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, _nine_ times, and rising to your feet and kicking him for good measure because you felt the pain he had meted out on Nicolò as if it was your own.

“Shouldn’t have done that,” you muttered, as one of the female clergymen took her chance, and ran the guard through the heart with her sword, a wince of pained guilt on her face.

You coughed, and turned, almost afraid to look at what had happened to Nicolò.

To your surprise, he was already sat up, and staring, open-mouthed, at you—

“Yusuf?”

His accent had softened, drifted somewhere beyond Genoa over the decades, but— oh God, this man was _beautiful_.

You held out your hand, and hauled him to his feet, as his eyes moved, up and down, as if to check you were really there.

(You were barely wearing anything, which probably had something to do with it. He, at least, had a tunic, and a surcoat, albeit with a mighty, bloodied rip in the front where the entry wound had been.)

“It’s you,” he said, in a now-archaic dialect of Genoese, after a pause that seemed far too long, examining your palm in his, looking into your eyes—

“We need to go,” you replied, also in Genoese.

He blinked, as if you had muttered a word in a completely foreign language.

Go you did, once one of the clergymen had passed you a tunic. Nicolò passed you the guard’s knife, and took the longsword for himself.

The next group of guards, a pair, went down with little resistance. Nicolò plunged his sword into the chest of one, used him as a battering ram to fell the other, and then passed you _that_ guard’s longsword, which you only just managed to catch by the cross-guard, and used to swipe at the legs of the next pair.

And the next.

And the next.

Maybe you _would_ get used to fighting alongside this man.

  


* * *

  
  
  


In the Arctic Circle, a combination of the Gulf Stream and unprecedented thawing of the permafrost will produce angry gyres of plastic pollution, volcanic ejecta, flotsam, and jetsam.

On a shrinking ice floe, one particularly unfortunate polar bear will save herself from choking by coughing up two pieces of material that, by rights, should _not_ be in the Arctic Ocean.

One will be a long, continuous strip of plastic, probably once used to bind beer cans together.

The other will be around 30% of a human brain stem.

  
  
  


* * *

  


“You did good work there, Yusuf,” Quỳnh told you later, as you sat on the beach at Monte Argentario, after a day’s hard riding to the coast had made your legs and pelvis and shoulders ache. “You’ll make a mighty addition to our team.”

The group had to split into two pairs to fit onto the tiny boats Andromache had hired to take you back to the mainland, departing from opposite sides of Bisentina. You and Quỳnh on one, Nicolò with Andromache (who, Quỳnh told you, would allow you to call her Andy) on the other.

This, you guessed, was what they did. Righting wrongs. Using their gift to save lives. Standing on the aft end of a departing ship, arrow trained at the abbott of Malta dei Papi, as Quỳnh did, snarling at the assembled guards in Latin: “if you are in no hurry to meet your God, do _not_ come after us again. Christendom is a very small place when we are angry with you.”

You had almost felt proud as your ship cast off and set for the mainland. ( _Almost,_ because there was a pang of regret that you weren’t on the same boat as Nicolò. And _almost_ , because most of this was your fault anyway.)

“I’m tired, Quỳnh,” you said, and meant it, because you felt worn down to your bones. You had been killed at least twice the previous day, and ridden a distance you thought impossible to get here by sundown. “I can’t do this all the time.”

“Nor can any of us,” she replied, cracking a forlorn smile. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”

You snorted. Laid back on your arms, and sunk your heels into the sand.

“If only.”

“What do you mean, _if_?”

You looked to your left, where Quỳnh now sat upright, her brows furrowed, as if she were cross-examining you.

“I guess not everyone can have what you and Andy have with each other,” you said.

She laughed at that. A full-throated belly laugh, one that seemed incongruous in a woman of her apparent age. (Much like the belly-laughs your mother made in her old age, before she passed on.)

“Yusuf, I don’t travel with Andromache because we’re both immortal. I travel with her _because_ I love her.”

“Are they not the same?” you wondered aloud.

“Maybe,” Quỳnh replied. “Eternity is a long time to spend alone.”

You winced.

“I’ve been dreaming of him for ninety-nine years,” you said. But, in your heart of hearts, you knew… “he won’t feel the same way.”

“He dreamed of you, too, you know,” Quỳnh said. “You made quite an impression.”

“We did kill each other,” you shot back, rueful.

“And?”

“A century, dreaming about someone… I didn’t even know his name for the first fifty. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me.”

“He doesn’t know you _yet_ ,” Quỳnh smiled. “You’ll get to know him very soon. You won’t have much choice.”

“And what will I learn about him?” you asked. “What if—”

“Yusuf,” Quỳnh said, interrupting here, raising her hand to stifle your babbling. “If you want to fuck him, that’s OK, you just have to ask. The worst that happens is he says no.”

 _I’m more interested in him fucking me,_ you did not say, as you cleared your throat, and said, again: “We’ve barely spoken. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Well, then,” Quỳnh said, grinning, squinting, her hair silhouetted in the glare of the setting sun. “I’d say you’ve got some catching up to do. A hundred years is still a long time.”

“Yeah,” you replied. Almost wanting to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. “A long time to pine over someone in your dreams.”

“You _do_ know the dreaming stops when we meet, Yusuf?”

That made you blink, and start, and scuttle backwards in the sand—

“Sorry,” Quỳnh smirked. “I guess Andy left out that little detail.”

You couldn’t decide if that made it worse or not. There was nothing supernatural about this: it was mere lovesickness. Pining after someone who didn’t exist—

“You’ve got time, Yusuf,” she grinned, and then her eyes flicked a little to your left, and she nodded to the distance, and whispered, “come on. Here’s your boyfriend.”

You steeled yourself with a breath before turning around, and noticing the two extra horses on the horizon.

And there—hair matted with sweat, surcoat rolled up and tied around his waist, skin ruddy from the glare of the sun—

There he was.

To this day, you can’t remember if it was you who started running first, or him.

All that matters is that when you did finally crash into him, and the two of you spun around, and clung to each other, and cried more tears than you thought you had in you, it felt more like home than anything you could remember in your long life.

  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  


To the horror of the scientific community, there will be a sudden thaw in the Arctic ice floes in early December this year.

  
  
  
  
  


* * *

  


On the first night, you laid down by the campfire, side by side, and talked for hours as you watched the stars. Him in Genoese and Latin, you in something between Derja and classical Arabic, switching between them fluidly when you came across a word the other did not understand.

One hundred years was a long time. In the century since you had first tried to gut each other, Nicolò had washed his hands of the Crusades, had several crises of faith, tried to defect four times, and had never quite been able to shake the idea that the two of you were meant to find each other again.

(He, like you, had got into the habit of getting into trouble. Breaking up fights. Putting himself between the powerful and the vulnerable. Getting captured and tortured for his trouble.)

Somehow, although you were shattered and sore and barely had the energy to remember your own name, let alone process the last century of events— _somehow_ , his voice kept you awake until sunrise.

As you did finally drift to sleep, you wondered what you’d done to deserve him coming into your life.

  


* * *

  
  
  


A sudden re-freeze will cover the Eastern Seaboard of America with four feet of snow, and pummel Iceland with 65mph winds from the west.

  
  
  


* * *

  


It wasn’t until the second night, after a day of foraging and hunting while you waited for Andromache to secure your passage out of here, that you felt brave enough to ask if you could kiss him.

Quỳnh had been right, of course. You could no longer ignore the way his eyes followed you around, or the way every touch you shared seemed to linger. He was unimaginably charming, and you felt yourself melting inside every time he smiled, a boyish grin that belied his one hundred and twenty-nine years on Earth.

As both of you sat by the fire, drying off after a swim in the Tyrrhenian Sea, you decided it was time, and said to him, heart thumping: “I’d really like to kiss you.”

Nicolò snorted. “It’s sweet of you to ask permission,” he beamed.

“Only if you want to try it,” you said.

“I do, Yusuf.”

And then, he came around the fire, dropped to his knees so he was level with you, placed his hands on your bare shoulders, and let it happen.

It was clumsy. Not quite desperate, but impatient. Both of you had waited for most of your life to do exactly this, with exactly this person.

There were more tears. Nicolò gave a breathless laugh, before pulling you back in again, harder.

That was also the first night you slept in each other's arms. With your fingers intertwined, the world narrowed so it was just the rhythms of your breathing and heartbeats and the occasional growls of satisfaction Nicolò made. Just the two of you.

Half-asleep, your lips moving messily against the nape of his neck, you mumbled: “I think you may be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, Niki.”

He squeezed your hand tighter.

“Are you sure about that?” he whispered.

It was only when he tilted his head around, and stared at you, grinning, eyes sparkling in the moonlight…

“ _I_ think you’re very handsome, Yusuf,” he whispered, and stole another kiss before pushing himself backwards, into you, and your heart felt like it was ready to explode out of your chest.

Every night of those ninety-nine years of pining still hurt, but it was over now.

You two had fallen in love very quickly after all.

  


* * *

  
  


You will have no idea how long you have been adrift, because you will still be dead.

This will change soon.

  
  


* * *

  


### Now: Saint-Malo

“I gave the chocolates away,” Nicky confesses, in Italian, as he sits and places the paper bag next to you. “There was a girl with her kid by the cathedral, they looked starving. I got them some coffee and croissants as well.”

You lift your pencil from the paper. He’s not smiling, nor apologising, nor seeking your approval or validation—his face seems gloomy, and he’s staring out to sea as the clouds lighten.

(Ninety-five decades of progress and society still will not feed everyone. It appalls you.)

“You’re too kind, Nicky,” you say.

“You’d do the same thing, and you know it,” and he _does_ smile at that, bouncing his shoulder off yours. And he’s right. You once managed to give away one of the Old Guard’s safe houses, to a young transgender woman in New Jersey who’d been disowned by her family at the height of the AIDS crisis.

Sometimes you feel like you should be more generous. At your grand old age, you have no interest in hoarding. Right here, right now, you’ve got a pencil and paper, a warm coffee, and Nicky at your side. That’s more than everything you need.

The clothes you bought last night really are flimsy, and probably making you feel much colder than you are. The coffee helps, although you know you’ll need to move on soon before you start shivering. Maybe you’ll find a charity shop before getting the train or cycling out of here.

“Bit cold,” you remark, pointing to the distance—just beyond the ancient fortress, a woman is treading water in the sea, her skin flushed pink.

“Not up for a swim yourself?” Nicky teases.

“I’d have to kiss you afterwards,” you grin. “Wouldn’t that be a shame?”

Not like he needs the excuse. He kisses you anyway, and then peers at your sketchbook.

You turn back the pages for him. Nadiya Hussain on the TV in the cabin, frying bread. The fortress at Saint-Malo, with a tiny figure in the water. Nicky snorts as you reveal a study of the cabin at night, with himself strewn out on the bed, face down, naked. Nile, with those hoop earrings. Copley, from behind, regarding the pinboard in his study. Booker, on the beach at the _Prospect of Whitby_.

“Do you really think he’ll be OK on his own for a hundred years?” Nicky asks, his voice suddenly hushed.

(The one hundred years when you were alone, the century when all you had to guide you was your memory of what the nameless Crusader looked like, hangs above you like a cloud.)

“No,” you reply, and suddenly feel very cold indeed.

“I know,” Nicky says, resting his cheek against your shoulder. And then, as he’s opening his mouth to say something:

“If he needs us,” you propose, “we help him. No matter what. He’s family. I love him.”

“I love him, too,” Nicky agrees. And then nods: “yes. Yes. If he needs us, we’re there for him.”

You take a furtive glance around, to check no-one is watching, before kissing Nicky’s forehead.

  


* * *

  
  


You are so, so hungry, but have no time to even think about doing anything about it before you drown again, and your head is dashed on the rocks.

The Arctic Ocean courses through your ribcage.

  
  


* * *

  


### To Come: Chilworth

The feast of Saint Nicholas will, at first, be quiet this year.

The Old Guard will still be at Copley’s house, because he has ways (that Nicky dares not ask about) of keeping himself off the radar. The closest alternative bolthole is in the Scottish Highlands, only accessible by train and then a ten mile hike, and that will be too much for Nicky to contemplate right now. Almost everything else on this island has been knocked down and turned into a car park or luxury flats by now.

In past years, you’ve been the main one to make a fuss about Nicky’s onomastico, mainly as an excuse to give him a second birthday, to bake him a cake and kiss him and then make love to him in the evening. If the Old Guard were together, it would be an excuse to buy trinkets: some kind of unusual volume for Booker, a lump of baklava for Andy.

This year will be very different. Andy will have explained the significance of the day to Nile and Copley, and they will leave Nicky to himself as he curls up in an armchair, a pile of your old sketchbooks to his side.

He will rest his fingers on almost every page, soaking in contact with something you touched. Some of the books will be decades old. One, from the 1980s, shows Nicky sat at a restaurant table somewhere on Mallorca, with a bizarre hairstyle that was probably fashionable at the time. Another, from the 1960s, shows Andy and Nicky standing outside a church in Cleveland, while Malcolm X delivered a speech inside.

Nicky will spend most of his time with the sketches from this year. The torn-out sliver of the page where you’d drawn Nile for the first time. The sketch of himself, freshly-resurrected after being ambushed in Sudan. Booker, by the Thames. August, in Warsaw, and the three of them forming a protective barrier between the police and pro-LGBT protesters at the President’s swearing in. September, and the White Cliffs of Dover.

And then, the sketches will abruptly stop, because that’s when you did.

Andy will insist to Nicky that he has to eat something. Nile will bring him mac and cheese, and Copley will offer him tea.

Nicky’s fingers will rest on the last few blank leaves of your sketchbook, and he will feel like crying again.

Expecting to face his first Christmas for centuries without you.

  


* * *

  


Your next breath will be cold, explosive, and the world will roar and hiss at you.

You will wonder, not for the first time, if this was what the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) saw and heard on Jabal an-Nour. If this was Paradise. Or if it was Hell.

Your fingers, cold and clammy, will come down on hard, black stone, and sand, and water.

  


* * *

  


He will be woken in the middle of the night by Copley’s aggressive typing, and Nile hammering on the door of the guest room.

“You need to see this,” she’ll say, as Nicky answers the door, his chin carpeted in stubble, his clothes and hair askew, his skin clammy.

The lights in Copley’s study will be on, and Andy will be peering over his shoulder, at one of the three screens, at something that looks like a satellite image.

“Hilde Ragnarsen just sent me this,” Copley will say, sat at the desk in his dressing gown. “Aerial surveys from western Iceland. Look.”

He will point at the screen Andy is looking at. An aerial photograph over four days, rotating.

On an isolated black beach, the kind that looks like it produces angry sleeper waves, there is a small, fleshy-coloured patch.

In the second picture, it will have grown.

In the third, it will have developed appendages— arms, and legs.

In the fourth, it will have developed a perceptible fuzz of black hair on its scalp.

Your Nicolò will stare at these images, again, and again, unblinking. Astonished.

“It could be anyone,” Andy will remind him.

But she’ll also take his hand, and squeeze it. Copley will book them flights to Reykjavík, and a helicopter.

  


* * *

  


How many times have you been drowned by now?

  


* * *

  


It will be after your one hundred and fifty-ninth drowning that you finally hear something other than the crashing of waves, the howl of the wind, and the gurgling of your own lungs.

Hurried, thumping footsteps turning up shingle, and a voice, commanding, a Chicago accent—

_“I NEED SOME HELP OVER HERE!”_

There will be the sound of something that might be a car, or a hovercraft, or a helicopter, of propellors and rotors moving, of a downdraft and moving sand—

“Joe!”

It will take you some seconds to recognise your own name—

And gravity will seem to invert itself, as something clutches you from both sides, and blood suddenly rushes to your head—

You’ll feel a shoulder digging into your chest, and taste salt, and the surf.

“Gotcha,” she will say, as the world turns again, and she brings you upright, and braids of black hair hang down on your face. “I’ve got ya, Joe.”

You, almost too weak to open your eyes, will allow your head to tilt backwards, as Nile steadies her footing against an incoming sneaker wave, allowing it to crash past and recede before—

The rising Icelandic sun will catch on little droplets of the ocean, surf hammered against the coastline and churning into the sky.

“It’s OK,” Nile will say, holding you at the back and under the knees. “You’re safe now. Welcome back, Joe.”

Tentatively, as if this will break the illusion, you will try taking a full breath.

Nile, alternating between glances into the distance, and at your face, will smile.

And then there’ll be more footsteps, over the sound of helicopter engines, and—

Something will touch your face.

_“Yusuf.”_

And then you will finally relax, because—

as your stomach growls impatiently with hunger—

and your joints ache from a lack of motion, and being left to swing according to gravity—

and there are warm droplets, salt water, Nicolò’s tears, falling on your face—

it won’t matter.

You will allow yourself to drift off, succumb to the exposure and the starvation and the shock, and die for the last time. 

This time, you won’t have to do it alone.

  


* * *

  


### Epilogue: Mdina

You always seemed to keep dragging me back here, not that that was anything I ever complained about.

The first time I set foot on Malta, it was with you at my side. We had barely disembarked before you took me to the Jewish silk market, walked through Yaron the bookseller’s door, and proudly introduced him to the man from your sketches. His face turned from shock, to wonder, to delight. Then you introduced Master Yaron to me as the man who had located me at Malta dei Papi, and brought us back together after decades.

This island is special, because it is _us_. The culture has Italian influences. The language is Semitic, and mutually intelligible with modern-day Tunisian Derja. We have swum in the sea more times than I care to count. Every time, it feels more special. It is as easy for me lose myself in the verdant beauty of this place as it was to lose myself in your eyes.

It is rare for me to come back so soon after a previous visit, especially for two breaks in quick succession. You made _such_ an effort last time. Three weeks in a spacious apartment looking out over the Med. Long walks. Lazy days on the beaches. Restaurants, imqaret from most every vendor we passed, those evenings when you rustled up something in the apartment kitchen.

It almost felt like too much, but there was no changing your mind, and I loved you for that. “Nothing is too much effort on your nine hundred and fiftieth birthday, my darling,” you’d said, as we laid on the bed watching the sun go down.

We never made it here for yours. 2016 was a terrible year for many reasons. That was why, back in March, having just watched you survive a massive dosage of barbiturates in a laboratory in London, I suggested we should go back.

The events of 2020 got in the way of that. Your death included.

But I’ve made it here anyway. Same apartment as last time, with the landlady, Mrs Spiteri, as incredulous at my age as she had been last year (when we arrived as Joseph and Nicholas Smith-Jones, with nine centuries subtracted from our true ages.)

This time will be different to most visits to Malta. There will be fewer spontaneous restaurant meals. No drunken visits to karaoke bars in Paceville. No slow-dancing on the streets of Valetta. A mandatory fourteen-day quarantine brings back memories of the Black Death, although running water and Netflix makes it considerably more tolerable this time around.

As with most Decembers these days, it is unseasonably warm. On Christmas Eve, as the quarantine expires, the showers of the last two days have vanished, the sky is blue, and the sea temperature is a tempting twenty-one degrees celsius.

And so, here I am, standing on the balcony, waiting for the espresso machine to finish rumbling, resting my elbows on the parapet.

The last time I was in the water was on Hallowe’en, when both of us drowned trying to rescue the other.

Part of me wonders if that could happen again. If a sudden maelstrom were to sweep me away to a fate of eternal death, and regeneration, and more death.

But there have been so many days, and so many lifetimes, and so many individual traumata, that I _cannot_ let this get in the way, because there is so much more. The first time you kissed me, after we had swum together off the coast of Monte Argentario. Eternity is a long time to carry a specific fear with you.

The gentle rhythm of the tide is broken by the calling of gulls, and the clinking of porcelain from the apartment’s kitchen.

“Get tired of watching me sleep?”

I can’t stop my face settling into a smirk as I look over my shoulder.

You haven’t bothered to put on a shirt, not that I mind. You pass one of the espresso cups to me, touch yours against mine, and we down the first coffee of the day together before I get impatient and lean into you for a kiss.

“You’re looking handsome today, Yusuf,” I whisper in Derja, because it’s true and it bears repeating every single time.

You make a flattered snort. Somehow it means more when it comes from me. And then you tug gently at the fabric of my t-shirt, and we fall back into each other for another kiss, and a hug, and a little part of me still, after all these years, can’t believe how lucky I am that you’re here, and that you came back to me.

“I was thinking of going for a swim in the sea,” I say, switching back to Italian as I look back out onto the Med. “It looks nice.”

You’re nodding, and outwardly smiling, but there’s a tiny bit of tension in that smile too. A recent memory that you’d rather forget. (You did spend the best part of six weeks regenerating and then immediately drowning.)

“Do you want to try together?” you ask, as if there was ever a question.

And I can’t help but smile again, and take your hand, and squeeze it.

“Only if you want to, my love.”

That raises a full, unqualified grin. It’s been rare for the last week or two—since Nile picked you up from a rocky beach on the western coast of Iceland, and you died of starvation twice in the aircraft—but day by day, more and more of you is starting to come back, and come out again, and _everything_ –from the arch of your eyebrows, the way your lips curl into a smile, the softness of your hair and your beard and your voice—

It is like falling in love again.

We will decide later if we’re actually brave enough to go for a swim today. For now, this is enough: watching the glide of your fingers as you sketch anyone and anything; passing food between us as we experiment in the kitchen; wrapping myself up in your arms and falling asleep to the sound of your breath.

In a few short decades, we will each have lived for a millennium. And right now, I feel like I could survive another thousand years, and another, and another.

One day, our time will come. I know not whether it will be the same time. Whenever it is, it will not be enough, because no time short of eternity is enough to be with you.

But for now, Yusuf, for these shining moments, none of that matters. Because we’re alive, we’re happy, and I’ve got you here, with me.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Here With Me (Marshmello, feat. CHVRCHES):** written by Marshmello, Steve Mac, Iain Cook, Lauren Mayberry & Martin Doherty.
> 
> ****Further Inspiration:** it will be obvious to anyone who’s seen it that this was heavily inspired by _Years and Years_ written by Russell T. Davies, and also by _[queers in love at the end of the world](https://w.itch.io/end-of-the-world)_ written and designed by Anna Anthropy.**
> 
> **Thanks for reading!**


End file.
